PHILIP GREENSPUN:
All right, folks, before Tina is
going to talk, I'm going to share with you
something that I've never said to anyone before in 55 years. I figured it out on
my own by thinking. So when you put in the
flaps, the airplane's nose has to go down. So you put in the
flaps, nose goes down. Think about the tail plane. Remember, a tail
plane is actually flying in the
downward direction. So the angle of attack
of the tail is negative. And if you put the airplane
a little bit more nose down, that increases the
angle of attack on the horizontal stabilizer. And it can become a
stalling angle of attack if that horizontal stabilizer
has been rendered inefficient by frost. Does that make sense? So remember, the angle
of attack of the wing is positive between the
relative wind and the wing. But the tail plane is
flying down, generating lift in a downward direction. Wings pull up, tail pushes down
in a conventional airplane. And when you go a little
bit more nose down, then you have a higher
angle of attack on the tail. If that becomes a
stalling angle of attack, it's not generating the
necessary down force anymore. So the airplane stalls. Does that makes sense? Francis says, yes. He's awake. All right, well,
anyway, thank you guys for being here
for that unusual moment in my personal journey. TINA P. SRIVASTAVA:
All right, now, we're going to jump into radar,
and communications, flight information. And we're going to do a
little thing that you probably haven't done for a long time,
especially not here at MIT. We're going to sing
the alphabet together. So it's going to
be a great session. So we'll start with radar and
Air Traffic Control, or ATC services. So what's a transponder? Why do we have transponders? What does it have
to do with anything? So a transponder is something
that helps enhance your radar return, so that the air
traffic controller can better understand where
your airplane is. So who knows just
generally what a radar is? Let's step back. Do people know what radar is? Who's seen the movie or read
the book Hunt for Red October? Goodness, only half the
class, that's really a shame. In that situation, we're
talking about sonar. But sonar, since it's
audible, is much easier sometimes to think about. Well, in that movie, we
have some of the characters that are in a submarine. And they're trying to
find another submarine. So they send out
a sound, a sonar that goes out and is supposed
to bounce off of whatever is out there and come back. So if there's a submarine,
it will bounce off. So you hear, you know, ping. And then if it comes back, they
can hear the sound coming back. Well, radar works the same
way, but it's above the water. And we use radar
to detect aircraft. So the air traffic
control center has a radar that basically sends
out signals that bounce off of airplanes and come back. We also can use radar
for other things, like terrain avoidance,
so very complex airplanes. Not usually your little Cessnas,
but some more complex airplanes might have a terrain
avoidance radar system. So as they're flying along,
they send out a signal. It bounces off a
mountain and comes back, and it tells you there's
a mountain over there. Well, we want to make sure
that that return, so the signal bouncing off, is very clear and
provides as much information as possible, so that
the air traffic controller knows where you
are and what aircraft you are. So inside-- yes. AUDIENCE: I think it's
important that we all realize [INAUDIBLE]
invented right where we're sitting right now. Do you know that? TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: Yeah,
that's a really good point, so just remembering where we
are here at MIT and that radar was, in fact,
invented here at MIT. It's a very good point. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
this building. AUDIENCE: Well, [INAUDIBLE]. AUDIENCE: This building
used to be army barracks. And because radar
was invented there, MIT had to keep the army
barracks as a historic site. And there were,
like, wood floors. And I had classes in there. It used to be the MIT
model [INAUDIBLE].. And they finally got permission
to demolish the Army barracks to build this building. So it really was right here. TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: Oh, wow. That's great, so
a little history about what was here before this
data center was built here. That's really great, thanks. So with that great history
about where we are and radar, a transponder is actually
a piece of equipment that you have in your aircraft. And this is generally
what it looks like. So it has some numbers
across the bottom where you can type in a particular
transponder code or a squawk code, as it's called. And there are different types. When we were talking about
the charts and airspace, we discussed how
near the class bravo we had a big ring
around the side that said mode C transponder. So it required a specific
type of transponder, so that the air
traffic controllers know exactly what the
altitude is of your aircraft. There are a bunch of
different squawk codes. One that is probably the most
important for you to remember is a 1200. So that is the VFR or
visual flight squawk code. So if you don't have a
particular flight plan going on, you'll need this squawk code
dialed in almost all the time. And this is usually a question
on the FAA exam you know, if you're a VFR
flight, and then they add a bunch of other
things to the question. But if you're VFR flight and
you don't have a specific flight plan, or flight
tracking happening, then you should be on that
1200 squawk code. There are also a
couple other ones. Hopefully, you
won't have to deal with this in a small,
you know, two-seater or four-seater airplane. But in case you
get hijacked, you need to enter a particular
squawk code, 7500. Seriously, please don't enter
this unless you mean it. You might find
yourself entering this. You might hear someone not
actually say the word hijack. Maybe they don't
want your person hijacking you to know
that that's happening. And they might just say, confirm
transponder squawk code 7500. And if you confirm, that
means you've been hijacked. You might see a special
plane come fly up next to you or something bad happen. So please only use
this if necessary. Lost comms is really
important, 7600. So if you indicate that,
it might be the case that your transponder
is working even if your radios, for
example, are not working. So by indicating this, that
would be how you tell the air traffic controller, for
example, the tower controller at your airport, that, hey,
I don't have radio comms. And that's when they would
use that light gun signal, as we discussed the
different colors, to indicate different instructions to you. And then in general, if
there's just an emergency, if you've lost your engine, if
you're declaring an emergency, 7700 is a great one to
just indicate to everyone that you're in trouble. So don't accidentally dial
in these squawk codes. Please be very mindful
of these in particular. And in general, there's
also an FAA question that comes up that
says, you know, what's a squawk code you don't
want to dial in accidentally? And those are those
three at the bottom. So let's just take a step
back and talk about this. In general, when I
first became a pilot before I learned
all this material, I was under the impression
that you pretty much always had to have a flight plan. That before you
flew anywhere, you had to decide where
you were going. You had to file a flight plan. You had to communicate
to different people and tell them that this
is where you were going to go and get it approved. And then when you took off, you
had to fly exactly that flight plan. Well, turns out that's
not always the case. And in fact, that's
only usually the case on specific types of flights
or an instrument flight, for example. But most of the time in general
aviation on a good weather day you don't have to
file a flight plan. And most of the time most
people don't file a flight plan. You can even decide what you're
doing after you've taken off. It's a good idea to know
in advance generally where you're flying, because
you need to know certain of those required things
we talked about-- airports in the vicinity,
fuel, runway length. But if you always fly kind
of in your home airport area, so if you fly here at
Lawrence, or you fly out of Bedford, Beverly, one
of the local airports and you're familiar with all the
airports in the area, when you take off on a given day
you don't necessarily have to tell anyone in
advance where you're going. You might go with an instructor. And that instructor, kind of
as you're flying, will decide, you know, we should do a
couple landings at Worcester. We should practice an
instrument approach at Lawrence or whatever they're
deciding in the air. And so you don't have to
file these flight plans. So when you're in the air
there are certain times that you don't actually
have to talk to anyone. And we discussed the
different classes of airspace. So as long as you're not
in a class of airspace where you have to be
specifically communicating, you can actually just take off
without a lot of communication equipment and just look
outside the airplane to avoid aircraft and
go where you're going. But if you do want to
have some guidance-- so let's say you're
flying somewhere you're not in a class bravo
or a class Charlie airspace. But you know, say you're
just taking a flight. You want to go south to
Provincetown, let's say. And while you're
flying, you just want to have an additional
pair of eyes in the sky to help you know if there's
a really bad quick changing weather front coming in that
maybe developed that you didn't notice before you took
off, which usually-- we'll talk about weather data. Hopefully, you'll
know in advance. Or you just want to be aware
and alerted to other traffic in the area, traffic
meaning other airplanes flying in the area. So you can actually choose
as a voluntary thing to call in and ask the air
traffic controllers to give you those traffic advisories. And there are different
types of services available in different areas. There are even parts
of the country where it's not available at all. So even if you wanted
to have someone to talk to you when you're
flying up there to tell you what's going on, there
is no radar service in all parts of the country. So how do you
request the service? So you can do it
a couple of ways depending on where you are. Sometimes when you're
still on the ground before you've taken
off, you're taxiing or you're in the
run up area, you can ask for certain
types of flight services. But a lot of times,
it's after you've taken off from the
airport, after you have left the tower controller. And you've switched
to a local radar. And you want to ask for some
types of radar following. So in general, whenever
you do a radio call, you start with who
you're talking to. So in this case,
Boston Approach. So Boston Approach is
who you're talking to. And then who you are-- so in this example
Cirrus 707 whiskey tango. So that's the name of the
airplane that you're in and the tail number. And then you have to
say where you are, so they can try to find you. So you can say 5
south of Hanscom. So that means you're 5 miles
south of Hanscom or Bedford field. And then what you want,
why you're calling-- so requesting VFR
advisories, Provincetown. So that's saying kind
of where you're going and what you're
asking for help with. So once you do that and, first
of all, before you call in, you want to listen to the radio
for just a moment to make sure you don't talk over somebody. But once you make
that call, you're waiting for the approach
controller to call you back. And so if they call
you back, they'll say who they're
talking to first. So that's you, so
seven Whiskey Tango. And then they'll tell you
what to do, squawk 4231. So that means to type into your
transponder the numbers 4231. And ident, so ident
is short for identify. And there's an ident
button on your transponder. When you hit ident, it
basically blinks on their screen to make them find
you easier with all the airplanes on their screen. OK. And it's also possible that
you call the controller, and you don't hear any response. Maybe they're busy
doing some other thing. So you give them a
little bit of time. You can just make your
call again and hope that they respond to you. And once the
controller tells you, you know, radar
contact, so that's where they say that they
found you on their screen. So you know, radar
contact 7 miles south of the Bedford airport,
that means they caught you. And in this example,
as you can see, you traveled 2 miles before they
actually got the radar contact. Sometimes that happens. When you're getting
traffic advisories, they do it in
reference to a clock. So if you remember,
you guys have to go back and remember
your analog clocks. And you know, just so
I do it to you guys, so you're looking here. So you know, 1 o'clock,
2 o'clock, 3 o'clock, so basically it's like a clock. And they're trying to do
it in reference to you. So when you flying the plane
look at your 3 o'clock, that means look out
your right window. It just noted that wind
can affect that sometimes. So even if they said 3 o'clock,
it might be at 2 o'clock. So just keep that in mind. So we'll just do a little
practice question here. So here just to
make it easy, we're saying the pilot is flying
on a heading of 360. So why is that easy? Well, 360 is north. And so north sometimes makes
it easy to think about. So if you're flying on
a heading of 360 degrees and the controller says traffic,
10 o'clock 2 miles southbound, where are you looking
for this traffic? So A, B, or C? Shout it out. AUDIENCE: A. TINA P. SRIVASTAVA:
All right, good. So you're flying north. And so when you're talking
about traffic at 10 o'clock, so 10 o'clock will be a
little bit to your left. So that's the 10:00. And then 2 miles
is kind of how far away that is in the direction
that traffic is going. Yes. AUDIENCE: Is that clock
heading relative to you? So if you would be traveling
at heading of zero, would 10 o'clock be southwest? TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: Yes. So the question was, is
the clock relative to you? So it is relative to you. So we just made
it easy by saying, you're flying 360 or north. But yes, if you
were flying south, 180, if they say
10 o'clock, it's still going to be out your left
window a little bit forward. But in that direction, it's
going to be now southeast. Good question. OK. So we've already talked
about this a little bit yesterday, the ATIS, or
Automatic Terminal Information Service. So we talked about that when
we were looking at the charts. And we talked about
the ATIS frequency. So it's a frequency
you can dial in. And basically, it's information
that's being broadcast. So when you dial into
that particular frequency, you get a certain
amount of information. Now, the first
couple times, I admit when you hear this
ATIS information, it seems very overwhelming. And you might have to listen
to it 3 times, 4 times even to understand what
they're saying. But I trust you, it gets
a lot easier over time. So they give you a whole
bunch of information. So they give you
the airport name. That's really
important to listen to. Maybe you dialed
the frequency wrong and you're getting the ATIS
information from the completely wrong airport. So look at the airport
location, and then the letter. So they'll say, you know,
Bedford information whiskey. So that letter is referring
to the most recent update. So let's say you listen to it,
it says information whiskey. Then you go off, you do some
practice turns or whatever. And you're coming back to
Bedford, and you dial it in. If it's still
information whiskey, then you don't have to listen
to the whole recording. You already have
that information. But if it's now advanced
to the next letter, then you know it's
new information. So you need to listen to it. So a whole bunch of weather
information is provided here. So it'll give you the time. We'll explain what we mean
by Zulu time, the wind, visibility, ceiling, those
types of information. It'll also tell you
local information, so if a certain
taxiway is closed. Or right now, you're likely to
get a lot of those warnings, because there's snow everywhere. So they might have piled
up snow on certain parts of the airport. So they'll indicate that those
different taxiways or runways might be closed. So in case you want
to listen and practice to listening to different
ATISs, this is an example. You can click on and
listen to what it is. There's also a phone number
that I've highlighted here. So you can just use
your regular phone. Call that number, and you can
listen to the ATIS information. And it updates
approximately once an hour. It can update more often,
especially if weather is changing frequently. They're also flight
service stations. And there's a lot of
way to get weather data. So when you're on the
ground before your flight and you're preparing,
you can actually get a weather briefing. You can get a full
weather briefing. It's very important
to do this, especially before your FAA check ride. But also, any kind of
cross-country flights, it's a good idea to call in. And you can provide
your tail number. You can indicate where
your starting airport is, where your destination airport
is, when you plan to take off, how long you plan
to be in flight. And then that way they know
what weather data to give you. And they'll actually just
tell you all the information that you need to know
in a very long spiel. So you want to be ready to
write all that information down. But what's really
great about that is they also keep a
record that you called in and that you got
this weather data. And so it's one way
to kind of demonstrate that you've adequately
prepared for the flight and gotten the appropriate
weather briefing in advance. All right, so radio
procedures, so this is where we're going to do
our fun alphabet test here. So we actually did
this last year, but some people said they
kind of forgot the alphabet. So it wasn't that they forgot
that B stood for Bravo, they just forgot what letter
of the alphabet came next. So to remove that as
an excuse for you, I have the full alphabet here. And together, we're
going to see how much you know about the full
aviation phonetic alphabet. So what they mean is instead
of saying A, you say alpha. Instead of saying
B, you say bravo. So let's go through together. So let's start from the top-- alpha, bravo, Charlie, delta,
echo, foxtrot, golf, hotel, India, Juliet, kilo, Lima, Mike,
November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango,
Uniform, Victor, Whiskey-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] TINA P. SRIVASTAVA:
Yankee, Zulu. All right, good job. So I know that some of you
aren't familiar with that, and that's totally fine. So if you were just
listening along, that's OK. It's good to just get
used to hearing it. But it's a good
thing to practice. And you might notice
that in your daily life, especially if you're
someone like me that has a very long last
name, Srivastava. I have to spell
it out to people. I love to use my aviation
phonetic alphabet to do that. And you might find
a fellow pilot on the other end of the line. So that's always fun to do. But it's good to just
start practicing this and get used to it. Not only is it a fun trick you
can whip out when you need to, but it's extremely helpful just
to have that kind of memorized and be familiar with that. In terms of the
numbers, you pretty much just say the numbers. Sometimes people say
niner instead of nine, some people don't. Also, instead of saying
three, they say tree. A lot of people consider
that pretentious, and they don't like
it when you do that. But officially, you're supposed
to say tree instead of three. It's supposedly easier
to hear on the radios. There's also different ways
that you describe a number. So if you're talking about
1,200 feet, like your altitude, you say 1,200. But if you're over 10,000,
then you say one zero thousand. And then if you're
talking about a frequency where you have a decimal
point, so you would say 124.4. So it's really
important to do that, because if you
start saying 124.4, then you take up too
much time on the radio. And people aren't used to
hearing the numbers that way. It can confuse people. So just a question
to make sure you've gotten that, so A, B, or C? AUDIENCE: C. TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: Right, so
one zero thousand five hundred. There's inevitably a question
on the FAA exam about this. It's not that hard to do, but
please try to remember it. All right, so Zulu time is
the same as the UTC time. So does anyone know what
time zone we're currently in? AUDIENCE: Eastern. TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: Eastern. But is it Eastern Standard
Time or Eastern Daylight Time? AUDIENCE: Eastern Standard Time. TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: Eastern
Standard Time, that's right. And do you know how
many hours that is different from the Zulu time? AUDIENCE: 5. TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: 5, right. So you subtract 5
from the Zulu time to get our Eastern
Standard Time. And does it stay
like that year round? AUDIENCE: No. TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: No. So when it turns into Daylight
Time in the March time frame, then you do minus 6 or minus 4? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] TINA P. SRIVASTAVA: Minus 4. So it's good to just know that,
because a lot of the weather data and information is
provided in Zulu time. And you might need to convert
it to your local time zone. So when you're
speaking on the radio, it's very important to
know that that radio is for essential purposes. You know, it needs
to be available if somebody is
having an emergency, if somebody is lost
or disoriented, if somebody is having a problem. So you don't just speak
and talk on the radio unless you have something
in particular to say. That logic goes out the door
if you're at a very tiny, not very often used airport. The other thing
to keep in mind is that a lot of the
communication radios operate at a VHF, or
Very High Frequency, which means that
it's line of sight. So if there's a mountain
range in between you and what's
transmitting, then you won't be able to
hear that connection. So there are a
number of airports in the Northeast that
are kind of nestled in between some mountains. You've got to be very
careful of mountains. Philip talked a lot
about fog associated with mountains and different
wind effects near mountains. So mountains are not
something to be trifled with. But in addition, you may
not have proper radio communications. So if you're trying to land at
an airport in the mountains, you may not be able to
get the ATIS unless you fly high enough that
you have a line of sight to that airport above the
mountains, for example. And then whenever
you're using the radio-- we already briefly covered
this with one example. But there are a couple
things you need to say. So you need to say you, so
who am I talking to, first. And then who I am,
where I am, what I want, and then sometimes
you have to say with, with meaning what information
you have with you. And that's referring
to the ATIS. So if you are trying to take
off from Hanscom Airport and you have received the
ATIS information whiskey, then you say with whiskey. Because if you
don't say whiskey, then they might not
know if you have the right barometric pressure
setting, for example. Or you might not know that
an airport runway is closed. So they want to make sure you
have the right information. So this is an example. So first, whenever
you get on the radio, don't just start talking. First, listen to
make sure you're not talking over anybody. And then state all that
type of information. So in this particular
example, it's a Cessna coming back to
Hanscom to land there. So you would say, you're
talking to Hanscom Tower. So you would say, Hanscom
Tower, Skyhawk November five three five six niner,
5 miles west of the field. Field is referring
to the airport. Inbound for landing,
so that's what I want, with information whiskey. And one thing to keep in mind
with all radio communications, you are the pilot in command. It's important that you first
aviate, which is fly the plane. Then navigate, make sure
you know where you're going. And last, communicate. That's really important,
because sometimes there can be a very
aggressive air traffic controller on the phone
trying to get you to respond or, even if you've declared an
emergency, trying to help you. And if you need to tell them
to stand by, if you even need to unplug your
communications so that you can focus on landing the
plane, you should do that. Because aviate is
most important, then navigate, and
finally communicate. And if the air traffic
controller gives you any instruction regardless
of how assertively they tell you to do something,
you can just say, unable. That means you're
not going to do it. They have to figure
out a way around it. They have to either move
other planes out of the way. And you're telling
them what you're doing. So in the unfortunate
case of the-- ultimately positive
case of Captain Sully landing in the Hudson,
if you watch the movie or if you hear the
recordings of that, you hear that the air
traffic controller is trying to be really helpful
and is trying to say, hey, you can land at Teterboro. You know, I've cleared all
these airports for you. And Captain Sully
just says, unable. So there's a Common Traffic
Advisory Frequency, or CTAF. So this is where there
are a lot of airports increasingly, unfortunately
due to budget cuts, there are more and more
airports that don't have operating control towers. So in these spaces,
you have a frequency that airplanes can
just talk to each other on to make sure they're
coordinating with other people there. So I'm going to give you a
couple examples and procedures. So you want to do
your first call 10 miles away from
the airport and then just report certain things. So when you're entering the
downwind, the base, the final, these are the legs of the
traffic pattern to land. When you're leaving, also when
you're taxiing on the field, those are things that you would
want to call out on the radio. And nobody will respond to you. Sometimes you just say
that, so that anyone who's around who might
be in the vicinity can hear that there's another
airplane and what you're doing. And so just kind
of tying it back to when we're looking
at the charts, so here's a snapshot from a
sectional chart. So you see in the middle there
there's a tiny little airport. It says, Jamestown. So if you want to figure
out what the CTAF is, so just zooming in there,
so you can see where it says in magenta Jamestown. It talks about the airport. It first gives the ASOS,
which is the automated weather information. It gives you more
information there that it's the bottom right
numbers 123.0 is that CTAF. So that's the frequency
at which you would just announce that you're coming in,
that you're landing, et cetera. So there are a lot of
different radar facilities. You may not necessarily
interact with all of these as a private
pilot, but there are things called clearance delivery. They're really frequently
at busy airports. And they talk about a lot
of specific operations. You probably won't
deal with this much as a private pilot just
getting your first license. Ground control you'll
definitely talk to if you're at Hanscom, even at Lawrence. There's usually both
a tower and ground. And so when you're ready
to enter the runway, so you finished
your engine run up, you're lined up waiting to
enter the runway, that's when you talk to tower. You tell them that
you want to take off, and then they give you
clearance to take off. And when you're flying and
approaching the airport, you're talking to tower. But once you've landed and
you exit the active runway, then you switch over to ground. And ground will tell you how
to taxi around the runway and get to wherever you're
parking your airplane. So if you lose your
communications, the first thing you
should do is actually make sure you did lose
your communications. It turns out vast majority
of the time you actually just bumped your plug
out of the socket, and you just need to plug it in. Or you turned your volume down. Or you're not talking
on the right frequency. So make sure all
of that's working, because it's very infrequent
that your comms actually die. But if they do, we've
talked about how you can enter that
transponder code and indicate that you don't
have your comms available. And we talked about that that
transponder code is 7600. So that's the last
communications. And depending on the
class of airspace, they might give you a light gun
signals to tell you what to do. Or you could actually just
go to an untowered airport where you don't require
communications with anyone, and you can and just
kind of look around, see and avoid other
aircraft, and land. You can also transmit in case
it's the fact that your ability to hear has died, but
your ability to transmit is still alive. So you can still
transmit, you know, I'm approaching such
and such airport. I'm entering the final. But don't continuously transmit. Because keep in mind it might
be that your transmission is working just great,
you just can't hear. So don't clog up
the entire radio. This is just a review of those
light gun signals as well. OK, so emergency
procedures, there are a lot of different
emergency procedures, but here we're focusing
on from our radios and comms perspective. Again, you need to first
aviate, then navigate, then communicate. So the first things
you do really depends on what the
emergency is, right? If it's an engine
failure, then your focus is on pitching to an
appropriate airspeed, so that you can get
the greatest time and distance to where
you need to land, finding a place to land and
trying to restart your engine. That aside, with regard to the
radios and the communications, there is an emergency
frequency, 121.5. There's a squawk code, 7700. We already talked about that. And you can radio just
mayday, mayday, mayday. That alerts folks of the fact
that you have an emergency. We also discussed when we
were talking about required equipment on your
aircraft, there's a such thing called an ELT, or
Emergency Locator Transmitter. And this thing basically
turns on by itself and will basically
broadcast where you are. And it needs to be
tested fairly often. You can actually tune
into the frequency that it's emitting at to
test if it is transmitting. OK, flight information, this
is our last big section. So this is talking about
information around an airport. So I'm going to grab
the ForeFlight again. So again, just like with
the case of the sectional, there's always a
physical version or an electronic version. So the picture you
see on the slide is something that you
could actually look at. So there's an airport
flight directory. So that will give you
the types of information you're looking at. Or on a ForeFlight, and
I'll pass this around, you can search a
particular airport and get the same information. So I'll just pass this around. So there's a lot of
good information. We already discussed some
of it when we were first talking about charts and runway
markings and runway length and those types of things. But from a communications
perspective, it also has a lot of great
information with regard to what the ATIS is, what
the tower frequency is, what the ground, all of
that type of information. And we've also
discussed previously the FAR/AIM very large
book of regulations. There are a number of other
types of notices called Notices to Airmen, or NOTAMs. And NOTAMs basically
can be warnings of different types of things. We've discussed a TFRs or
temporary flight restrictions. But you might also get
a NOTAM that there's parachute jumping in the area. So watch out for that happening. Sometimes there's also
an advisory circular. These are not
required or binding, but information that
is put out to help you understand or
clarify if there's confusion with regulations. OK, I have the answer
up here for you, but just a couple
practice questions. So this one is about
basic radar service. And so this is about what
we were just describing. If you call up and ask
for flight following, what are they providing you? Well, they're providing
you safety alerts, traffic advisories. Sometimes they'll do vectoring. So what do I mean
by vectoring is let's say there's traffic,
traffic 12 o'clock 3 miles. That means there's traffic right
in front of you 3 miles away. And then they come back. And you know, you're
saying, looking for traffic. You can't find the traffic. They say traffic
12 o'clock 2 miles in the same altitude as you. So if you're at
3,000, they say 3,000. And then you still can't see it. And you're just like, you
know, negative traffic. So then they'll just tell you. You know, they'll just
give you another heading. So they'll give you a
number, so heading 360. Or they'll say, turn
10 degrees left. And so that is what they
mean by limited vectoring. So they'll tell you what
to do for a little bit to avoid something dangerous.
