HAI@Work: Demystifying COPTER IFR

uh panelists today kind of gave a couple of them away already uh jim viola our president and ceo um we'll be speaking here in just a few minutes chris hill our director of safety will be joining us a little later in the webinar to help moderate the question and answer a session for this one we have a great list of panelists today chris bauer he is the president and ceo of hughes aerospace forum he's a retired military aviator he's a dual rated atp with more than 40 years of experience in aviation including active involvement in the faa's next gen implementation and the global performance-based navigation or pbn movement [Music] brian burby beraby excuse me has works with chris he's the chief designer for hughes aerospace corp his experience includes work as an air traffic controller with u.s air force and uh as a terps a terminal instrument procedure specialist with the faa we have nolan crawford who's an aviation safety inspector at the faa responsible for improving flight operations standardization and aviation safety through supporting the faa's next generation program our final panelist today is max gornish uh he's the business commercial aviation sales manager at garmin since joining the firm in 2011 he has worked as a technical lead on the ar inc production team and has played a significant role in expanding the database and capabilities of navigation data provider arrow nav data our webinars our r excuse me interactive we do ask that you uh submit questions so we can work with you to get some answers uh following the presentations is when the q a session will be held best way to ask questions is using the question module at the bottom of your screen or possibly the side of your screen uh we will try to follow all the questions um or get all the questions we can if you use the chat feature that's fine that's everybody's going to be able to see that we can't guarantee we're going to be able to get all the questions from the chat feature so please try to get the ones into the question module this webinar is being recorded we will make this recording available online and we should be able to share the link with everybody knowing that a lot of accidents are involving ifr situations we ask that you share the video with anybody that you know who is not able to see this today now i'd like to ask jim viola to turn his camera back on and join us uh for this part of the presentation thanks dan uh you know helicopter flight has been around for decades and yet you know pilots in our industry continue to make some of the very same mistakes one of the most common still is that a helicopter pilots encounter has been and it still is you know even as you know a couple weeks ago in new york city is weather i don't care where you are weather can change quite rapidly and and i know that because it has on me in the past and this is true uh even more now it's climate patterns are changing globally so this is an international problem it's not just a regional problem of vfr conditions turning imc so when all the weather radars the weather cameras that are out there and we put more out there so you know they can help make those decisions for it and the advanced weather forecasting tools are available and they continue to get better pilots still find themselves entering imc conditions and they normally when that happens if they're not uh properly prepared for that transition those are the ones that don't make it back so there are reasons some will call them excuses or continue to fly into ifr conditions when pilots should have stopped that flight and went with the hai program of land and lit most though do survive and and even more we're hearing more reports of people who are surviving without a good plan but it depends on their training their past training but tragically there are those that should not enter at all because the aircraft and their training as well are not up to par so if you haven't seen our 56 seconds to live safety program and video i encourage you to take time to come to the website and watch those videos we hope you find different points in your aeronautical decision making process where opportunities exist as they do every day before you go flying while you're flying to make the correct decision to halt a flight before it ends badly so what makes the difference between those who survive and who doesn't one of the smartest decisions a pilot can make is to properly plan for whether before you ever encounter quite honestly i thank you because most of you are watching this presentation live or watching the recording because you want that information you want that education our team of panelists today are here to help you prepare for imc conditions and survive as always i encourage you to share this video with pilots who aren't here today and we can work together to stop one of the most common causes of helicopter accidents and i appreciate that you have taken the time to attend this presentation and or watch the video so dan back to you and our great panelist thank you jim appreciate your time today i'd now like to uh invite chris bauer and brian baraby to join us for their presentation thanks dan thank you [Music] on behalf of hughes we'd like to express our condolences to harold's family and the family at hai and his friends a tremendous loss and also thank dan jim and chris for putting the webinar together along with our panelists nolan crawford and max cornish so i'll start off by saying um you know today's panel isn't about hey you should be doing this or you should be doing that um and in my my 40 years of flying i could tell you that i've done everything wrong that you could do and somehow managed to live and the message is that we're all human we go out there and we make mistakes and you know if you learn from them um you can build a better mousetrap and that that better mousetrap is the ability to safely fly in an all-weather day-night environment and ifr for helicopters particularly under next-gen and and given the faa's leadership in this space is something to take advantage of dan if we get the next slide there we go so um for those of you who flew in the military you know first we got to tell you what we're going to do then we're going to tell you how we're going to do it and then we're going to tell you how we did it so the first slide is what we're going to talk about today at least from the hughes perspective um we'll have a brief overview of copter criteria and the safety benefits talk a little bit about helicopter modernization no one will cover some of that from an faa perspective and we'll cover it from a hughes perspective what the current challenges are and i just picked one because we have limitations on time talk a little bit about weather that jim viola talked mentioned as to what the challenges are there and what's coming out that that can improve that and then and a very special feature with our chief designer brian baraby to talk about um a chart clinic and uh it's not an all-encompassing you know we'll walk away and know everything about charting or how charts are made or what's behind the chart but just to give you a an overview and brian decided to drill down on the differences between proceed visually proceed vfr and how that's evaluated and how that's captured onto a chart we could have the next slide please so what's the biggest benefit of copter ifr and hands down its safety if an aircraft is on an instrument flight plan it's flying an instrument approach um you're not going to have a c-fit incident like you would trying to maintain vmc conditions in ifr conditions where you have to fly lower and lower and lower and i'll raise my hand and say i've i've scud run uh in my career and it's not because i woke up that morning and decided well that's what i'm gonna do it's that i found myself in that situation and and because of that one of my takeaways as a helicopter pilot was to get better at ifr instead of it being a weakness to make it a strength so avoid flying low slow you know where where where um ifr means i follow roads and that often leads to disaster where you contact things like wires poles buildings and and the like um when you get into low visibility it's a whole nother world it's like flying with a refrigerator box over your head you can't see much you don't see things coming even if you're really familiar with the area it looks a lot different when you're down into low visibility add to that flying at night or flying without a horizon and it's a recipe for becoming disoriented and maybe losing control of the aircraft or or having an accident and certainly if nothing else uh when you get back on the ground you're like why did i do that you can leverage the benefits of contemporary avionics and not sound like the old guy in the room you know when i started flying we had like you know no instruments in the helicopters or very very uh labor-intensive to fly instruments modern avionics today and auto flight systems give us the ability to leverage that into a lower workload environment where the pilot isn't necessarily having to both fly the aircraft and manage the workload in the situation and the communications but using autopilots using glass using databases and instrument approaches moving map displays electronic flight bags you're able to manage the situation and monitor the performance of the aircraft and keep the aircraft in a safe um flying envelope in fact one great takeaway is if the safe outcome of the flight is ever in question then whatever you're doing you should probably stop and get the aircraft out of that undesired aircraft state into a desired aircraft state that means climbing up getting to a safe altitude talking to air traffic control getting a clearance whatever it is that gets you away from the ground um all-weather day night reliability is one of the tenants of copter ifr and in particularly lpv approaches lpv approaches essentially allows you to put an ils type precision approach into a heliport or into a location where the pilot's going to have vertical guidance as opposed to dive and drive next slide please so here's a real world example um hughes had developed this approach it's a copper instrument approach with both lp and lnav minima we'll talk about that in another slide about the differences and shortly after implementing this copter procedure at the erlinger medical center it was used on a patient flight and the pilot turned around went back and took a picture of the aircraft and to me it's a success because if everything happened the safe outcome of the flight was never in question the patient got to the hospital to get the treatment that they needed and what you can't see in this background behind the helicopter is all of the terrain you look at the chart you can see the terrain but if you look at the picture you just see gray and i think it speaks to this type of deliberate methodical flying that you can achieve with with copter instrument approaches if you look on to the side of the slide here i've got copter lnav copter lpv copter lp rnav departures and airways these are what's available in the copter ifr world or you could have a basic lateral navigation procedure and that basic lnap procedure is a non-wasp procedure so raw gps is accurate to about 10 meters when you can differentiate gps or augment it you can get it down to one to two centimeters of accuracy and that would be a copper lpv or lp procedure the lp like the lnav is lateral guidance but because of wasps the containment comes down to one to two meters so you pull in less obstacles it gives you lower minimums on an approach if you have an instrument approach to get in you have a copter ifr departure to get out and then to connect all this into a network there's airways we're all familiar with victor airways low altitude airways i don't think we have copters yet flying in the jet routes so i won't bring up j routes um tk's which are the faas moniker for a copter route and often used interchangeably with transitions and zk routes which is something new that we worked with the faa on that uses wasps to create an rnp required navigation performance an rnp of value of 0.3 so that's three tenths of a mile if you're new to the rmp world it's coming in fact it's already here we'll talk about that in a subsequent slide and required navigation performance means that there's a 95 percent probability that the aircraft will remain within two times the rnp value so the faa tells us that the wasp constellation is 99.7 reliable and it provides an rnp containment of three tenths of a nautical mile or an rmp of 0.3 and that's why that's important so when you get into a zk route you can get closer to the ground stay out of icing closer to obstacles and you only need 1.2 nautical miles of airspace to create that route as opposed to what you would need for conventional airway which is eight miles next slide please so how do we build a copter procedure into a heliport and there's a lot of science behind it particularly at hughes in what we're doing in that we will go out to a heliport we take a theodolite which if you look at the picture in the center is a camera image of a theodolite showing an eight to one slope um from the heliport and you're looking for obstacles that would penetrate that slope and that's your ingress and egress you're eight to one the other thing that we do um you look at the images we launch a drone and we'll create a photo mosaic of the heliport area and we can create from that a digital elevation model which can be processed in our software and we can look for penetrations in that eight to one slope and if we can eliminate those penetrations and an expert like brian can evaluate them down to the inch so if there's a tree you might see poking up in the slide in the on the upper right corner there's a tree coming through that slope and we can determine that if they could remove three inches of tree you would now have a eight to one that's clear for ingress and egress anything brian you would touch on on this slide i would say that the eight to one is is this the foundation of the visual transition um along with the heliport infrastructure the advisory circular is pretty specific about what's required to support a visual transition and we'll we'll talk about visual transitions a little bit more in depth when we get to charts suffice it to say the visual transition allows the aircraft to fly to the minimums that are on the chart whereas a vfr transition could take to shape a form of many different things your organization may have vfr minimums you may use the part 135 613 criteria for a vfr transition it's really important that the green section in the upper right corner uh picture is clear that would be our eight to one and in terps it's rise over run so it goes up eight feet for every one foot it goes away from the helipad and that's the basic so if we have a heliport that meets the design guide criteria for a visual transition and then we evaluate our eight to one and it's clear then we can proceed uh with the understanding that we have a pretty good chance of developing a visual transition which is ultimately the money shot would not be as advantageous to fly to vfr minimums when really flying to visual minimums are are preferred chris well thanks brian that that that's a good summation um we get the uh next slide dan so that teases up into proceed vfr versus proceed visually what does that mean and and it it still even experienced helicopter pilots have issues grappling with what proceed vfr and proceed visually means what's on this slide is a chart um that is a proceed visually instrument departure the burnt one and um to the right in a smaller graphic is a precede vfr departure which is the sickle one so in a perceived vfr situation there's no weather minimums on that chart for that departure and the reason is it depends on what's in your op spec what what does your ops spec delineate as perceived vfr those are your weather minimums proceed visually you'll see charted weather minimums because that is what's prescriptive for that particular approach because proceed visually is actually an instrument maneuver no different than if you were going to an airport and the controller asked you if you could see the airport let's say you were flying a helicopter and you're going to land at the g.a.t and kennedy and they said report the gat in sight a report um there's an american 737 you know you see him you know call that call that trafficking site once you call that traffic in sight you're proceeding visually but it doesn't mean that you're vfr it means that you're still on an ifr flight plan but you're providing your own separation from traffic and you're maintaining vmc conditions and if you were to go around or whatever you would still be an instrument target to the controller and that's what's going on here at the heliport with this copter departure or copter approach with proceed vfr and proceed visually we're advocating to the faa hence the [Music] to update the criteria they currently have and we're working with them to do just that to lower the departure minimums to avail ourselves of rnp ap h and r p .3 which provides greater accuracy in the avionics the criteria that was written for this was long long ago and maybe nolan might touch on that in his his discussion but i'd like to flip it over to brian because he could give you maybe a little bit more depth on proceed visually and proceed vfr again it comes back to the foundation we can have a really great looking mansion but if it's built on on quicksand it's not going to last and the same thing is true about helicopter procedures where they terminate and where they originate really says a lot about what you can and can't do if we were to develop a procedure to a field we wouldn't get very good minimums because it's an uncontrolled unmaintained unprepared surface there may not be any lights there may be penetrations of the eight to one surface so on and so forth if we have a helipad that was very thoughtfully put together the operator had the right kind of resources and a mind to do so he or she could develop a helipad that's going to support an ifr or excuse me a visual transition so this is uh the helipad at metro aviation and shreveport and this pad does support the visual transition so the question is well why does this the cycle one go vfr and the burnt one go visually the burnt transition or the burnt procedure transitions to the north where i have a clear eight to one fortunately the eight to one doesn't have to encompass the whole helipad needs to encompass 17 degrees excuse me six degrees either side of your departure course there's another visual assessment surface that we use also it splays at 17 degrees either side of that approach or that departure course then you can proceed via visually the cycle goes in a completely different direction it goes towards the east near barksdale air force base in in that direction there isn't a clear eight to one but the operator wanted to have the option of departing ifr once the aircraft reached its first fix of to the east the burnt is the reciprocal of the approach into the helipad so it's a it's a pretty easy uh a pretty easy shot to go back out the way you come in but there are many times where going out the way you came in puts you into a tailwind and we have location in san antonio where we know the wind primarily comes from the south so we depart to the south we're not limited to strictly going back out the way we came in there may be times where it's operationally advantageous for instance you have a clear eight to one in one direction you're going to go in and out that way chris thanks brian so let's go to the next slide this is a this is a good this is a good brian slide where he can show you maybe from an engineering analysis as a terps engineer how this this bulb we'll call it is evaluated at the heliport so this is a criteria that has been around since 2012. prior to that there was no ifr helicopter criteria for departures um when i worked for the faa the army had a carve out for departures but there was no public publicly produced criteria for departures and in 2012 the faa came up with a couple of things number one was copter lpv and also copter departures so the infamous bulb is the circular shaped construction around the waypoint tell you and that's an eighth of a nautical mile centered on that waypoint and the current criteria says that you're going to evaluate the tallest obstacle inside of there and there may not be a real obstacle there may not be a telephone pole or a building but we're going to assume an obstacle when cell towers started going up all over the place the fcc requires cell towers to be registered but the faa does not so long as they don't exceed 200 feet agl so as a fail-safe we assume an adverse obstacle of 200 feet and we plant that obstacle on the highest terrain in that segment and because we're using an altimeter that's used using the barometer we have a required obstacle clearance of 250 feet so this is a flat surface and nothing can penetrate that so if you had an obstacle of 200 feet and you had to put 250 feet on it then your altitude within that flat surface inside the bulb would be 450 feet and we have to round up to the nearest 20. so now it's 460 feet let's say i'm heavy with fuel and patience and i can't lift off my helipad and make that climb from the helipad to tell you so now you have to depart vfr and maybe that doesn't get it done because you're you're not in vfr uh vmc conditions so what we've been able to work with the faa on is the description on the left it's a little bit closer version of the waypoint and the helipad and the bulb and it's got three different surfaces the green surface is the eight to one surface the purple surface is called ocs one and ocs ii obstacle clearance surface one and two and that's our visual assessment area and then the blue triangle is called the obstacle identification surface and we have a big tower that's right off of the helipad this is the ross county uh the the ross county barracks for the state police in ohio they have a really big tower that holds their antenna and the hospital helipad is pretty close to that tower so what we've been able to do under current criteria is apply for a waiver to the bulb because if we just followed the bulb and we followed the current criteria the aircraft wouldn't be able to depart in this direction because it couldn't climb over that obstacle in the in the space that it has so we've petitioned the faa through a waiver process to say hey look we have a clear eight to one we have a clear visual assessment area and in our visual identification surface we found an obstacle so we're going to do several things number one we're going to tell the aircraft to depart on a track to crosstalia at whatever altitude is required number two we're going to chart that obstacle on the departure chart so that the operator is aware of its its location and where it is and this works in some instances and in some instances it doesn't we find often times that obstacles that control the flat surface aren't in the direction of flight they might be behind the helipad they may be way way over to the right side of the bulb and the aircraft is going to fly directly from the helipad to the waypoint so to further on chris's uh comment about working with the faa for new criteria we're proposing to get rid of the bulb if your vfr and your helipad doesn't support a visual transition then we're not going to have a bulb the aircraft is going to maneuver however it needs to maneuver to get to tell you and from telya the surface would be sloped so the containment which is on the right side again we have the the lines moving perpendicular to the edge of the bulb those are our primary and secondary areas associated with the rnp we're going to extend those to the alert the early along track tolerance which is the red circle around tell you and from there create a slope and that slope is 20 to 1. it equates to about 400 feet per nautical mile and then based on what the aircraft will experience in the ifr portion of this departure will set a minimum altitude across telia if the aircraft can depart that helipad visually then the construction that we see on the left with the the green the purple and the blue will be put in place the aircraft can track to that using the minimums associated with the departure which in many cases could be three hundred and three quarters versus say six hundred and three quarters that's uh that's some down in the weeds stuff but these are the kinds of things that go into developing a terps procedure now this is just a departure the approach is just the same for a visual transition to a helipad we still look at those very same surfaces they may be slightly different in geometry but they serve the same purpose chris thanks brian so i think for for the audience when you look at a chart some people feel when they have an instrument approach that they're getting a chart but the chart is just representing the science and the engineering effort that's behind the interpretation of all of these surfaces all of these obstacles the terrain and what gives you the pilot the the comfort of knowing that when you're on this procedure that you're going to be clear of all of these penetrations next slide in so i'll take a segway a little bit of an off ramp here one of our current challenges we're talking about departures that hughes has identified and is also working with the faa on is um i'll just call it the nassar exclusion so if if you've got a special instrument departure which the vast majority of helicopter departures are and if you use a contemporary electronic flight bag system where you try to file through lido's or foreflight or garmin pilot flightplan.com you're going to get an error message like you see on the screen here it's not going to be able to file that departure it'll file the rest of it and then there's a workaround and the current workaround is that pilots are putting the waypoints in the flight plan um as not a departure but just a string of waypoints and they're getting the clearance the danger there is if you get your clearance you're not getting cleared for the departure unless it's so stated otherwise you're being cleared to waypoints and that could put you below the taa the significance there is the faa can come after you and take certificate action or you could put the aircraft in a position where it may not have obstruction clearance so we've been working with the faa and advocating for the faa to put special instrument departures in the nassar which is a file that's generated every 28 days and that database file is where these electronic flight bags go to source your flight plans we're doing a trial right now and the faa has been very supportive of this particularly afs 420 and chicago center airspace and procedures and one of the operators that we work with up there osf aviation has allowed volunteered to be a guinea pig and we're looking at if we can't get it into the 28-day nasa perhaps a separate stand-alone database that could be accessed by an efb so when you file for the lear's one departure it'll find it and then you'll get the lyr's one departure so in the meantime before that happens you can file the waypoints but in the comments you should put this is for the layers one departure and when you get your clearance from air traffic make sure it's not just cleared as filed but you make sure you hear the word i'm cleared to fly the lear's one departure in this case as an example so this is something we wanted to bring your attention to it's something that again we're working collaboratively with the faa and uh and operators that are uh our huge customers and and not use customers to resolve next next slide down so talking about copter modernization um zk routes we touched on it earlier in the presentation this is an example of a zk route as you would see it on an efb in this particular case it's for flight and you can see the own ship display of the helicopter on there along with this zk route that i'm flying and this is in mountainous terrain um between morgantown west virginia um i think i did this one back in the winter time so what's nice about the zk route is it only requires the 1.2 nautical miles of airspace and they're dedicated airways they're not a transition they're a line selectable airway like max might touch on how that all goes into a database so as a pilot you can just pull it up um you can operate closer to the ground because the accuracy we were talking before you have eight miles of airspace for a legacy airway if you go to a transition route like a tk route you're looking at about four to six miles of airspace this this zk route or a wasp enabled rmp will get you down to three tenths of a mile so blowing that out times four the requirement would be for 1.2 nautical miles of airspace so not only does that help you in areas of terrain but it also helps you in areas where you have congestion where you can get more direct routings because we don't have to tie up or seek eight miles of airspace we may not get we could have a better shot at getting 1.2 nautical miles of airspace and when we talk about rnp apch which is the new designation for approaches and using wasps this all ties together into an architecture and ecosystem a network if you will of rnp 0.3 throughout so no matter where you are in the service area whether you're on a route you're on an approach or on a departure you're always getting this 0.3 required navigation performance containment and and there's that 95 probability that you're within two times rmp is six tenths of a mile and prior to the advent of of wide area augmentation or space-based augmentation um none of this was really possible one one note uh that i'll talk about at the end of the slide here is if your current op spec is 120 h122 to avail yourself of rnp apch and copter airways and departures it requires an update to the h123 ops spec next uh next slide so this is an example of an instrument approach copter instrument approach and in a couple of things that you're seeing on this slide radius to fix turns or rf you you're probably starting to hear that more and more in discussions about instrument approaches with seeing it on charts hearing it in the hangar you know what's rf well it's radius to fix it's it's a curved path that can either be straight and level or you could climb or descend on it it's extremely accurate in the sense of airing coating that tells the flight management computer whether that's a gtn 650 or a 750 a g1000 cockpit depending on what kind of avionics are in your helicopter if it's a contemporary suite it'll support this radius to fix turn that allows us to go around obstacles and terrain and airspace as opposed to having to dive and drive over the top of it we can go around it and with great accuracy there's an approach here in matagorda regional medical center and you can see the rf segment which is this turn right before the final approach fix and you'll also see this is taken from the the hughes app so the other advent recently is own ship display so you can have and you can see this red this red triangle with the ring around it so this was actually taken in the aircraft on the approach where i took a screenshot of the in the hughes app of this approach plate and you can see on ship display on it one of the benefits of own ship display particularly for single pilot ifr is if you've got the nav system coupled up and you're flying it on the autopilot i mean you look at the chart and the chart should match where you think you are as to where you actually are and it's just like having another set of eyes in the cockpit with you and if they don't match that might be a good time to climb up to a safe altitude and figure out what's not right what's not engaged or what isn't what isn't set right and i also wanted to show you what that looks like on the avionics is radius to fix turn um this is just a screenshot from our the one that's in our helicopter and you can see the magenta line and how it arcs to the left next slide this is a departure with a radius to fix segment the benefit there is not having to fly unnecessary track miles and unless helicopters you know since i've been flying them they've always been fuel critical as soon as you start the engine you're usually wanting to maximize the efficiency of the aircraft and the other problem with helicopters oftentimes is noise complaints or visual noise or don't fly over my my house or this area so with radius to fix turns we can tailor the ground track of the aircraft to its most favorable and most efficient flight path and you can see i took a screenshot of the uh the garmin this is a aspen glass that's in our helicopter and you can see the bank angle on this is is fairly benign it's um about seven degrees and you can see the wind right now we're on this radius to fix turn um and the wind is out of the west it's a crosswind of 25 knots and the crosstrack error is only uh 0.0 so again that great containment of being exactly where you want to be regardless of what the wind's doing whatever your airspeed is you're going to navigate with a lot more [Music] efficiency next slide i'll let brian speak to this this is part of our chart clinic so what i wanted to do is give you a couple of different uh examples of charting uh products that are out there the non-faa service providers have an obligation to follow a standard format it doesn't have to be jefferson or somebody like that but it has to be recognizable um and the faa has eight different volumes of uh charting directive if you will what's appropriate for font size font type so much what's going to be depicted and how is it going to be depicted so i wanted to look at a couple of non-hues charts and just point out some things that may be different for proprietary chart versus an faa produced chart if we start in the upper left-hand corner and by the way both of these approaches support l-nav minima only just azimuth with no vertical guidance so you have an approach course there's no was information here because there's no wash loss component in the case of copter 291 at indianapolis downtown you have an airport elevation but no runway and no touchdown the airport elevation may or may not be a factor in how your minimums are being calculated i don't want to jump around too much but if we took that 732 feet for airport elevation and then we look down at the bottom of the chart where the minimums are we have 13 40 and three quarters of a mile with 1340. so i would ask how high am i above the ground where how high am i above what was this minimum based on this is a basic question that i would ask as a pilot what is what are these minimums based on another uh point out here would be um proceed vfr if we read our read our notes it's a proceed via far from opnic or conduct a specified missed approach there we see our surface elevation of 824 feet so the surface is an evaluation of the terrain 5200 feet around the final fix in this point it would be opnic and the highest terrain is is derived and then the minimums are based on that you can see the helipad excuse me the helipad elevation is less than that i'm still not sure how 1340 in 1340 were derived from 824 feet but that's that's neither here nor there another thing i want to point is three quarters of a mile visibility preceding vfr in today's contemporary criteria i'm bound to chart a visibility minimum based on the distance between the missed approach point in the heliport if we look in the circular blow up here it says our heliport is on a heading of 336 for 4.2 miles from opnic another question i would ask is what's the three quarters of a mile based on some of the um particulars about these uh these procedures is that they're only vfr transitions in most cases and i won't say in all cases but in most cases faa procedures are going to be a vfr transition um i don't believe although i know it's in the works that there are survey standards for helipads vfr helipads specifically and so without solid survey data the faa opts to provide the most protection possible which is to have the aircraft proceed vfr rather than assuming a clear 8 to 1 surface some things that you see on the chart in indianapolis you don't see on the chart into southampton on the right here on the southampton approach we have what's called the pbn box and that's at the very top in a briefing strip and it says rnp approach as chris alluded to this is a harmonization with icao for many many years people would get rnp confused with rnpar which is a slightly different animal than rnp rnp simply means that there's a required navigation performance it doesn't mean that it's going to be something that you have to have a special aircraft certification and pilot training in order to fly this lets the pilot know that this procedure was based on rnp approach and that basically equates to the 0.3 on rnp this one does have a surface elevation of 39 feet and an airport elevation of 5 feet yet it will still use a vfr transition from the waypoint cran to the helipad this one has uh 560 foot minimums with a 521 has and that 521 plus your surface elevation of 39 gives you 560. so on the southampton procedure it's pretty easy to figure out what the minimums were based on this procedure has visibility minimums of one and that is based on the fact that if we look in our little insect here to the right we're on a heading of 197 0.9 nautical miles from the missed approach point truly we should look and see what the statute mile would be how that equates to 0.9 nautical miles maybe a little bit more than the miles statute mile next slide please so the hughes charts follow a fairly uh fairly uh to the close to what uh the faa charts are uh are doing um depending on the terrain that we're in we may add terrain colored terrain there are some that we may add just contour lines to give the operator the pilot some spatial awareness of what the terrain may look like that he or she is flying into the copter the papa version of the copter 139 into metro is wass since they're both copter rnav 139 would have to differentiate them somehow so we use use the papa designation for the lpv guidance we use the mic identification for lnav only guidance so the charts look fairly the same the waypoints are all the same the inbound courses are all the same we do have a wash channel up here in the top left hand corner we have our pbn box rnp approach with the sensor gps this has a helipad elevation because it has a visual segment so the minimums in the bottom here 426 is 250 feet above the 176 of the helipad and that gives us our uh d a and it's the same with the lnav version the mic helipad elevation of 176. it's 484 feet above the helipad which yields 660 for an mda the difference that that most people see is the the uh the mda and the da in this in this case we're talking more than 200 feet and that's really a product of the fact that the wasp procedure is much more narrow the lpv trapezoid and that's it is shaped as a trapezoid uh emulates that of an ils trapezoid on a runway um and that's what lpv stands for uh localizer uh with vertically guided localizer performance with vertical guidance and it's much more narrow so we don't pick up um the same kind of obstacles that we made with the lnf because it's 0.6 nautical miles either side of the center line in addition we have vertical guidance and we know that the aircraft's not going to not going to drop it's just going to fly that glide path so there are many obstacles that we can overcome by flying on a vertically guided procedure rather than dropping down to a minimum altitude and staying above it um like we do on the lnf the lnf has a required obstacle clearance of 250 feet just like the departure and the idf in the bulb it has 250 feet and so it becomes a flat surface whereas the lpv you know is a sloped surface another way to uh another reason this is differentiated between the m and the papa version is in the profile view i have a little angle and a description to the right of it and we can see that in both of the profiles on both the mic and the papa so for the papa version we can go from the da to the helipad 10 feet above the helipad at an angle of 4. 3.48 degrees on the mic however we don't have that same uh that same descent angle number one we're going to descend from a higher altitude number two i have a much larger area i have to protect and that means my visual area is bigger also and these little red icons here in the bottom right helipad sketch are the reason that this is different we're going to hold our altitude until we're beyond the missed approach point and then we're going to descend to a different hover height this will be at seven almost seven and a half degrees but it still provides that visual transition i can't put both of those on the same chart they would be conflicting different uh different descent instruction and a different hover height are really the only reason that these two are split next slide all right chris this is you all right time for me to wake up again um come on now this is fun stuff i know it is i know what it is so um one of the other challenges for helicopter pilots is finding weather good weather weather sources and we we worked with the faa on a project many years ago involving weather cameras we put a station in southampton heliport along with a wasp and adsb and some other features and the the biggest takeaway in terms of feedback we got from local pilots was they like the cameras the best to try to figure out what the weather was doing so the faa is working with advisory weather cameras and they're making them available and hughes has developed its own weather camera system and we're going to um actually display it at the next heli expo in dallas in march so aircraft coming to heli expo could actually use it as a safety feature to look at the weather um and have a real-time understanding of what the weather's doing you know the barn of entry for awos threes and and the like are very significant cost issues civil works issues um to install them and maintain them that may be outside the capability of a lot of heliports so the idea of this weather camera and advisory system is it's low cost it's easy to install it and it doesn't involve having to get a vhf frequency it simply works on the internet so either using something like the hughes app or just an internet browser you can go to the website here and you can pull up a camera and you could look in four cardinal directions you could loop it back a number of hours and you could see the trend in the change in the weather along with the the basic wind temperature dew point spread and altimeter and you could click on those and also pull up graphs and trends over a period of time just to get a sense for is the weather coming in is the weather going out or is it stable and then you could click on the image and get a clear day representation to compare to a present day which will help you understand um what you should be seeing and what might be covered up by obscuration so again something that we're working on for our customers to have a better sense of the weather to tie into these instrument procedures that we've developed and next slide please and we put this into an app one of the things we realized from an sms perspective was we didn't have great communication with the end state user which is the pilot that's flying the approach and he or she um sees an obstacle how would they get that information to us so we created this app that's free um and it has your special instrument approaches in it it has your charts it has own ship display so you could use it um you could also print charts from the app wirelessly you can submit safety reports it has a theodolite built in so if you see a crane or an obstacle pop up at your heliport you can take a geo reference picture of it send it to us and allow us to evaluate it and it creates a record of that event and it's just it's feature-rich and i won't go into all the things you can do with it but it grew into a really good communications tool for us and our customers to keep us surprised of things that are going on in their uh in their aor it also allows better visibility on notems when we issue a nodem even though we issue an faa nodem um you may have missed it just make sure that you don't and it also has a thing in there where you can put your own nodems so if you were going to a heliport and you didn't want somebody to park there or you wanted to put what the combination was for the gate you can put in your own nodems into this app and take them and include pictures as well next slide so that's it for hughes thank you dan for for sequencing the slides for us i've been trying to answer some of the questions i've seen pop up but uh we'll uh we'll turn it over back to you and our other panelists okay thanks chris and thank you brian now that was a uh that was that was a lot of information really appreciate your presentation this afternoon uh now like to uh invite nolan uh crawford to come on from the faa i will like to uh do would like to alert our attendees we are gonna go along this evening um this is a an important discussion there's a lot of information and so we hope you can stay with us if you can't stay with us tonight we hope that you'll uh be able to watch the video all right good afternoon dan if you could bring up my slides please okay not a problem good afternoon folks uh while dan's bringing those up uh we're gonna attack this a little bit different direction than hughes did they hit it more on the procedure side of it what i'd like to do is talk to you about the helicopter modernization team it's a team made up of multiple um faa flight standards lines of business uh in saying that they were also working across lines of business with such folks as airboards legal uh also working with some of our third-party developers such as hughes and hickok and working with our air traffic counterparts the five people that are presently on the team are listed there below myself who is the acting leader of the team we just lost a great asset we had some of you guys may know dante fontenot was down in baton rouge for a while and then over in the flight procedures and airspace group for a while we also have mike webb who is in afs 420 he's a terp specialist gerald polly also in afs 420 is a church specialist tom luperspeck is over in afs 200 he's in the 135 side of the uh of the helicopter world and we have eddie miller who is over in the afs 800 section next slide please all right so our our basic mission task is to bring the helicopter operations from the huey 58086 world that we all knew many many years ago to the modern side of it the s92s the aw139 and things like that well the only way we can meet what those aircraft have the capability of doing is to update and modernize the system so what we're looking at doing is updating all of our acs our orders our fars and our authorization documents and that's going to be the direction that i kind of go today is to one tell industry what we're doing some of the changes that we've made some of the changes that are in in the works as we go and also try to get some feedback via the question and answers via the uh just my contact information to say hey you know this is where we're at where do you want to go because a lot of this is based on industry what do you guys want to do how far do you want to take the helicopter world a joke but i kind of mean it in a serious way i look at that modern helicopter as doing the same thing that any modern business jet will do except it doesn't do three things it doesn't go as high it doesn't go as far and it doesn't go as fast but as far as the capability and the technologies the modern helicopter has a lot of the same bells and whistles that you will see in a lot of the new modern business jets next slide please so the purpose today is just to tell you the direction that the faa is going right now and with the modernization team some of the folks were working with and some of the projects were working i would like to ask the community today you know what the helicopter needs community needs are and to give you some of the updates some of the helipart evaluation changes that we are in the process of talking about brian was talking earlier about heliport surveys we'll talk a little bit about that we'll also talk about the 7480 which is the notice of construction alterations deactivations of airports um that way if you see a new heliport coming up or if you happen to be in the market to build a new uh heliport you'll understand some of the things we have to do we'll brush on the special instrument procedure side of it didn't want to go in depth because you just had an awesome class from from brian and chris on that we'll talk about some of the orders and criteria that we are in the process of updating and we'll talk about some of the roles and responsibilities of the faa next slide please so as far as the instrument world many years ago probably back in about the early 90s we started looking at what we can do for the helicopter world many of us that started years ago most of the aircraft back there weren't we're not instrument rated so we transitioned from the vfr world to the ifr world at a very very slow pace a lot slower than our airplane counterparts in many in many ways the first thing that came out was the point space proceed vfr procedure a way to think about that is basically a procedure that you're allowed to get into the ifr world and you fly a procedure down to a missed approach point but then you have to have your vfr minimums whether it be your op spec or the regulation rules that that have you have your minimums from there we progress to the point in space with the proceed visually again i will not go back all over those because brian and chris did a very good job with us and willing to answer questions on it though during the question and answer session the now we about four or five years ago we transitioned to the tk route which is a helicopter specific route and now we have since transitioned to special instrument procedure routes we call sk routes those are based on rmp 0.3 and the next thing we're looking to do in criteria we'll talk about it as we go is full ifr to and from the ground now if you look at the bottom of the chart here you'll see on the bottom left talks about minimum infrastructure that would be associated with the point and space proceed vfr type procedures if we go to the full ifr to and from the ground that's going to be your greatest infrastructure so that could be more space that could be more equipment that could be more lighting and a little bit of things in between there the question that i'd like for you to ponder as we go through this seminar today is to tell us the faa where do you want to go is the point in space via proceed vfr good enough for you is the point in space proceed visually good enough for you or is it important enough to industry as a whole to go to the proceed full ifr to and from the ground that's a question that that i would love to get feedback uh in the question and answer portion of this as we move through this next slide please okay some of the things that we've updated over the last year to 18 months chris and brian talked about a few of these uh meaning the h122 and h123 things that we've tried to do within the faa afs 400 and afs 200 got together and looked at the op specs uh and said okay what do we need to update what do we need to do to transition to bring the helicopter to the 21st century one of the things that airplanes were allowed to do that air helicopters weren't allowed to do was in the arena of alternate airports for ifr weather minimums so we looked at our what our counterparts were doing in the airplane world and we mirrored that to the best of our capabilities in the helicopter world as chris talked about a little bit ago helicopters are fuel critical at the time we take off we don't have the fuel a lot of times to go somewhere and then go a longer distance to reach an alternate it was not unusual for me in my airplane world to be filing to philadelphia and have an alternate in pittsburgh we don't have that luxury in in the helicopter world the h-122 which is the special instrument procedures for rotorcraft operations which authorizes you to do special instrument procedures as chris was alluding to that is your authorization to do that but if we want to move to the next level you have to have h123 which is class 1 navigation using area or long range navigation systems with wide area augmentation or wasps for rotograph rnp 0.3 that is out there at the this point the first three you see on here h105 h122 and h123 have all been updated and are published at this time and available h110 and h111 have been completed on the faa side as far as all of our writing is done we have gotten comments on them that is done we are waiting for a publication date and that is estimated to be somewhere towards the end of november 1st of december time frame that will be more in line with your cat 2 cat 3 procedures when the aircraft oems have them develop to that point some other things you can look to see coming out in [Music] december we have made some changes to the aim and the aip more specifically 10-1-2 which is helicopter instrument approaches 10-1-3 which is helicopter approach procedures to a vfr heliport and we'll have a new section coming out this year in december for departure procedures next slide please some of the folks that i mentioned that are on the team this is some of the other things that we are currently working with industry with other faa offices and oems across the board we have been looking at the weather project that was put into alaska several years ago and some other places we have now got a project that is going with a helicopter air ambulance a couple of helicopter air ambulance operators in mississippi in michigan we will continue to work that uh project at least for the next 12 to 18 months before we'll have any data on that a lot of us are working the 5g radar altimeter interference issues if you haven't heard about that you haven't read about that i encourage you to do so i encourage you to figure out how it will impact your operation your individual aircraft reach out to your oems and find out how it will affect them because it is a topic of pretty high magnitude for industry the fcc the faa and we are heavily engaged in it today one of the things that just came out was brief to hsac um two weeks a week and a half ago we did a weather study in the gulf of mexico we had a previously we've previously done one in 2017 to use weather boxes in the gulf of mexico to allow for ifr operations a another study was just released like i say about a week and a half ago we the faa are currently evaluating that to see if and when we will be changing any advisory circulars any regulations or any orders that may allow us to enhance our operations in the gulf of mexico the faa as a whole but we have members of the helicopter modernization team working with airports right now looking at a new heliport design guide trying to update the standards of that to make the heliport environment safer we're also working with airports to come up with a airport data and information portal or adaf a lot of folks with heliports you'll know that they move around and the data becomes corrupted or it becomes old or becomes useless we're trying to turn that into more of a digital format to make it easier to reduce the touch points to make it more readily available for those who need it whether it be the four flights of the world or whether it be the instrument developers of the world i just touched on a few of the h specs that we are currently working we are currently working on updating the instrument criteria i will go into that more as we move through this and the faa as we have asked airlines and operators to do to look through the lens of sms we are also doing that with our own processes today so sms is is a vital tool that not only you as operators and pilots and all can use but we also within the faa can clean up our own processes by using sms there's projects out there today with enhanced vision systems as you know the airplane world has been using enhanced vision systems under far-1 correction under 91-176 for several years doesn't really address helicopters so we are now trying to develop a head-worn display system relatively similar to a hud that you would see in a fixed-wing aircraft and that is an ongoing project as we move today as we all know the virtaport and the e-vital aircraft the electric aircraft of the future are kind of not the future anymore some of them have already been in introduced to the faa so we are in the process of trying to develop a vertebrate standard we are working with industry and many support groups on trying to figure that out and the last thing on this slide that i will talk about is we have been working for about a year year and a half now at updating the instrument procedure handbook you can anticipate that probably coming out mid-year of 2022. nolan hey i hate to do this to you my friend but uh we still got another panelist and probably not much time for q a so if we get an expedite to help out max i can do that boss all right uh the 7480 we talked about it a little bit ago it's a cumbersome process has been in the past what we're trying to do here is update that we we now have what i referred to a few minutes ago as the ada that we're working with airports if you're familiar with the old 5010 it was very cumbersome was a heliport because uh century we have now changed that and you can anticipate seeing a more heliport helicopter centric um process for that next slide please special instruments procedures we've talked about it already so i'll brush through this one pretty quick what we have available to the helicopter world today is the proceed visually and the perceived vfr what we're trying to go to is a non-precision and a precision approach and departure to the landing surface we are planning on putting a a table that will tell how to do that and the criteria and the infrastructure needed will come out in the next teleport design guide next uh slide please so what what's given us the catalyst to do a lot of this is congress passed the bill h.r bill 302 section 314 and it's allowed us to reach in and work with other providers work with industry and given us the funding we need to do some of the changes that changes from the vfr world that we're all used to whether it be just straight vfr or vfr heliport with procedures to do to it to an ifr heliport once we get that criteria established right now we are working with airports i was personally on two heliports this week developing that that standard that survey standard and uh more to come on that as as it matures next slide please okay this is one of the big ones i wanted to talk about the 8260 42 which is the united states standard for helicopter r nav standards we are in the process of trying to decommission that manual because it was predominantly two vfr heliports it wasn't pbn based and it led us to stay in the legacy rnav world what we're trying to do by this is we're taking the pertinent stuff out of the 42b and we're transitioning that into other terps guidance into the 0.3 the point 19 the point 46 and 58. if we had more time we would talk about those more in depth but just know that we are actively trying to change the old legacy rnav system to a more robust r p world as christendom just talked about with the ability for rf turns and narrowing the the terp cells that way we have a a tighter area less obstacles more precise flying next slide please this is basically just a cover slide on everything that we've been through today reach out to me if you have any questions or comments about the process today we can go into it a lot deeper next slide please this is some of the groups that we've already talked to i put this slide up to let you know that the information is out there in more depth talk to those folks reach out to us within the faa afs 400 to me mike webb gerald polly afs 200 tom lupersbeck afs 800 eddie miller and we will be happy to either present to your organization or talk to you as an individual on where we're going and what we're trying to accomplish next slide please that is all i have today uh i will be on for the rest of the meeting i will reach over and look into the q a and see if there's any questions that i can answer for you appreciate your time and again my condolences to harold h.a.i harold's family h.a.i and anybody who knew that great man have a great day yeah thank you nolan that was uh we hated to push you along uh brought you along but we're just we know that we have a set in time uh limit uh really grateful for all that information though and uh if anybody says have questions uh we will try to pass those along possibly by email we know we're going to run late i'd like to now introduce max gornish have him bring his camera up and begin this presentation thank you dan and every everybody who's given them their time to to join us today for uh this uh very insightful uh webinar um i'll start by expressing condolences to harold and to his family into the whole hai family um certainly was not privileged to have ever met harold but uh had an opportunity to read the statement that hei put out and um you know the world has clearly lost a great aviator and a great man uh additionally chris bauer um thank you for bringing uh this opportunity to me to uh kind of share with everybody how all of this ties together in the navigation database space and hopefully everybody will be able to see my screen and we'll talk about navigation databases and we'll do it on a very very high level so question number one is what's included in a navigation database so from chris bauer and hughes procedure designers taking into account obstacle clearance terrain to the end user which is you the pilots what exactly is in the navigation database and how does it come to be so here are some key features and data that you may see whether you have a garmin system aspen uh any other flight management system perhaps even an electronic flight bag you'll see airport heliport locations instrument approaches sids stars airways controlled and special use airspace comp frequencies runway helipad locations in-room terminal waypoints and there's more so in the garment navigation database which is available for anybody that flies with garmin equipment you can see that it's fairly comprehensive and this is a u.s data set only while we do have coverage that extends beyond just the us into canada latin america and south america as well but for the u.s for our purposes here we've got nearly 6 000 heliports over 6400 helipads over 350 helicopter instrument approach procedures and over 250 helicopter departure procedures and below i've listed just in general for those that are also fixed wing pilots or perhaps those that are interested in fixed-wing the coverage that we have with airports here in the u.s which includes alaska hawaii and all u.s territories in the pacific so the question really becomes now we have all of this data in a navigation database and how does that come to be what's the process behind getting it in there and it starts with a letter of acceptance which is a certification given by the faa as well as um the eos of the european aeronautical association uh here at home with the faa they hold by a standard called do200 and do 200 is a set of criteria and it's really a framework that those that process data and make it available for end users follow it's a rigorous process and the idea is keeping safety in mind so when we're flying whether in ifr or even in bfr but especially in ifr when we have no visual reference to the ground or to our surroundings how can we as pilots feel comfortable that our aircraft or our helicopter is going to get where we hope it will get and get there so safely all starts with the aeronautical information service state uh authorities such as the faa those can also include any military [Music] offices such as the air force the navy and the army as well as people and companies like hughes aerospace which holds a fort uh 114 cfr part 97 certification as authoritative procedure designers and that gives them the opportunity and the ability to actually design procedures on behalf of the faa for use in the national airspace system so what we do is we get this data from the source and that data is taken in by somebody who holds a type 1 letter of acceptance loa from the faa these are your data providers these are people that are taking data they're analyzing data they're processing data into a certified database and through what's called a data quality requirement they work with a type 2 loa holder and the type 2 loa are your fms vendors and your manufacturers such as garmin garmin avionics hold a type 2 they receive data from a type 1 that goes into their systems and at the end of the day though that type 2 data that database is what you all use as an end user whether it be when you're flying with the airlines general aviation military an end user can be a flight planning application it can be an electronic flight bank such as garmin pilot so on and so forth and at the end of the day this is the the do 200 aeronautical data chain so the question is what are our responsibilities as type 1 and type 2 loa providers to make sure that the data you're flying is reliable and safe so number one is we have to deliver data on a 28-day airact cycle and that data is based in coordination with data quality requirements as mandated by the fms manufacturers the data must be current accurate and complete data providers must make every effort to ensure accuracy through rigorous verification and validation processes and each whether it's a type one or a type two each entity has its own set of verification and validation that is ultimately signed off on by in our case here in the u.s the faa as the regulatory authority we have to maintain a historical record of all of our information that's in the database we have to maintain a system for handling errors whether those errors are identified early on in the process on the data received from the respective aeronautical information service or perhaps as an end user when you're flying whether in your helicopter and you're going to land it at any helipad or in while you're in route you say and you look at your database and say wait a minute what i see on my chart and what my database tells me those don't line up and that happens and we have a process in place to deal with it which is anything that we that is detected whether it be internally or externally has to be documented and resolved at the end of the day if we can't resolve any errors if we find them ahead of time then we may have to withhold the data all within the umbrella of safety being our top priority until we can work with the respective host country and make sure that we get any potential error or any potential discrepancy that is ultimately deemed safety critical resolved when we do discover something after the data has been delivered and as you're flying if we discover that it's our responsibility as an industry to issue a special notice to notify you the pilots that there's an error in the data so that way you you understand that you're made aware that this data that you have may cause a safety or flight issue that doesn't mean that it will and specifically on the type 2 side they have to ensure compatibility with specific airborne systems and what that means is for each respective helicopter whether it be um a sikorsky bell etc each manufacturer has its own design criteria and the systems have to be able to work with the design of the helicopter so as you can see already a lot goes into making sure that the database that you have in your aircraft that you're flying with is something that you can rely on and trust to keep you safe to add on to that as chris as you talked about earlier and touched on this what exactly will we see in our navigation database you know our equipment on the aircraft and how does that sync how does that correlate to perhaps what we see on our paper charts that we're flying so here's an example of the display this is a garmin gtn xi navigator and i've uh put it up next to a copter rnav gps and what you can see is that the procedure design in the visual display over here mimics and looks exactly like what you see on the chart it gives you a visual representation in the cockpit without looking at the chart which enhances situational awareness certainly if you're in in the soup in the clouds and you can't see over here on the left you'll see and i've selected the k transition here you'll see the sequence of waypoints that as you're flying and on the specified track that you're flying on you'll see where you're supposed to be at what time and in what location flipping gears once you load and activate the approach in your aircraft you'll be able to see step by step what wave point and fix you're at how far you have to go and you'll have to excuse the 482 nautical miles this is a demo i didn't have the aircraft centered perhaps where we would be coming from necessarily but beyond tag once you get to cool and og and you you can see here that each fix is designated as an initial approach fix auggit being the final approach fix and you'll see the the hard barred altitudes here that correlate to the altitudes depicted on the chart you'll be able to see that the navigation database really mimics and guides and is hand-holding the aircraft all the way down to the missed approach point and then executes the missed approach procedure so that if you fail the first time perhaps you can try again and that's all displayed here in the second box here you'll see the missed approach altitude which correlates directly to the lowest mda on the chart which in this case this particular procedure has lpd minima so it's got the most precise lateral and vertical guidance that you can have on the copter rnav gps procedure and the same thing holds true with the departure with a sid this one happens to be a very basic sid uh out of the same air uh same heliport ca37 but as you can see all of the waypoints and fixes that are depicted here on the chart are also shown in the navigation database and again if you load and you activate the departure you'll be able to see and really in live in real time you'll see these distances ticked down until you reach that fix and then the system transitions on to the next phase so hopefully try to trying to tie this all together and be mindful of the time why is a navigation database important why is it something that's important to have for all pilots whether you're flying ifr or even vfr so the traditional and non-traditional uses as you see here detail using it in the flight management system it can be used for flight planning simulation testing experimental aircraft and there's a whole host of other applications to it i know you know chris you design procedures and you want to know well how do i know that that procedure is going to be safe in an aircraft when we go and we go ahead and get that into a navigation database you can load that into your aircraft and you can fly it and report back and say you know what the procedure i designed checked out or the procedure i designed failed and here's where it failed and then we can fix it and test it again so there are a multitude of different uses and you know what really creates and makes a navigation database valuable and as we spoke about ifr and vfr use it can be used to navigate in a flight plan everything that you need is at your fingertips within the system in the navigation database all the waypoints all the navigates airways so you can get from point a to point b if you have a working autopilot you have autopilot integration so you've got your database there you've got your procedures in your database and your autopilot communicates with that database your aircraft flies itself i know i've done it personally and it flies it flawlessly and that really is a testament to the rigors of verification and validation that we do on a cycle-to-cycle basis to ensure that the the ultimate standard of safety is is upheld and especially on the garmin side recently we launched um as part of our autonomy suite auto land and smart glide capability which isn't available to helicopters yet but it's really the first of its kind for general aviation where if uh unfortunate situation arises and a pilot becomes incapacitated and a passenger who's not a pilot at all and is along for the ride what do they do they can hit a button and the airplane will literally land itself and that's because of the navigation database that's installed in the aircraft additionally situational awareness whether it's ifr and especially with vfr pilots a vfr pilot you're used to looking out the window and you're used to looking for railroad tracks power lines bodies of water to identify how am i getting from point a to point b or even if you're flying in the area you know how do i know whether or not i'm going to penetrate the airspace whether it be a class bravo class charlie all of that is depicted on the fms and in the avionics display whether it be a flight display or even a robust navigator you'll be able to see a pink line that shows if you're going from point a to point b am i on the right course or am i off the right course and that's not to say that if you're flying vfr you should keep your head focused inside the cockpit absolutely not you have to be out seeing a void but that being said this is a tool and really a necessary tool to to enhance aviation safety throughout the industry i had the experience this year going up to oshkosh wisconsin for air venture and i was really amazed at how many pilots had a database that was out of currency and the dangers behind that is is that aeronautical data is changing daily runways are being up numbered runway idents are being changed waypoints are being removed uh airport idents are being changed procedures are being removed procedures are being added so having a current database is really crucial i think to keeping the safest cockpit that you could possibly have with that being said certainly if there are any questions please feel free to type them into the chat and i want to go ahead and again thank you for your attention and your time today to to chris and to dan and to james at hai thank you for the opportunity okay well thank you max and now i'd like to invite nolan and brian and uh chris and chris to bring their cameras up this has been one of the most educational and information-packed webinars we've had in a long time so i don't think we're gonna have a lot of time for questions but chris chris he'll let you take it away all right thanks dan and uh hey great great job panelists today you packed a lot of information into a short amount of time we're beating you over the head with a a pot pan or whatever you know trying to get you to speed up nolan sorry we did that to you clearly it shows that a lot more a lot more opportunities to share this information so chris i'm going to go to you real fast just to assure folks of the plan we we certainly have you on tap for a follow-up webinar based on the interest here today we still have over 90 people tuned in and the rest hopefully will tune into the recording to get their information but we'll have a follow-up webinar but just real briefly tell us about your plans for hai heli expo in dallas on what you're planning on doing a continuation of this type of information got you muted there sorry um as i said earlier pilots we can't operate cell phones or um copy machines or anything on our own the uh the plan for hai is to put together a chart for the routes that aircraft will be flying to and from hei i think there's two routes this year for non-experimental and experimental aircraft that will collaborate with you on and we can make it available inside the uh the hughes app and geo-reference it to have own ship display we also plan on deploying the weather camera system and advisory weather so aircraft that are going to be participating at le expo can avail themselves of that safety feature and being able to decide whether they want to make a go no-go decision on the weather and what the environment around it looks like and we'll have one on display at our booth along with our uh flight inspection helicopter you plan on doing a chart clinic uh as a rotor safety challenge as well is that correct or is that still in the works planning wise no we uh we very much appreciate the invitation to provide a chart clinic i think um anytime you could get that time with with uh mr barabee is uh it's like going to a chiropractor and getting an adjustment you you walk away from it feeling a whole lot more limber and uh unassured a challenge on copter ifr so we could dive into some of these questions that we're getting about technology criteria regulate regulation and stuff yeah so uh just for all of you tuning in to ask the question i know some really great questions are out there take a look and make sure that it got answered in the chat i know our panelists here are still digging through those and trying to answer some of those for you uh we will not have time to get to all those questions here today unfortunately but we will copy their answers to these questions and post that as a supplement to this webinar we'll also probably be breaking this webinar presentation of the recording into the three distinct parts from our panelists today to ensure that uh folks who are tuning in and looking for a specific segment of this presentation can drill right into that or break it into three pieces over their time at their at their pleasure but let's just ask the one question that seems the most prominent whoever among your panel the question about the northeast and the challenges of instrument flying and you know ideas about getting routes out to long island and some of the challenges of going from vfr to ifr let's just make sure that that we hit that one in a succinct manner since that seemed to be one of the more prominent questions that flew in today nolan you want to take the first crack at it yeah i'll start with that one right now the faa is in the process of a we we call it a process project we are developing uh zk routes up in the northeast right now we're wanting to use that project to take to develop a process on how to develop those how to work with operators on how to do that how to not only get the flight standards portion in but the flight check portion and the air traffic portion in and we're reaching the end of that project as we speak with that we will we're hoping to move uh zk routes and other types of routing and rnp procedures to the rest of the nation so i i don't know of any specific projects right now in the new york area but i do know that we are wrapping up on the uh the northeast project that we've been doing and there will be other routes coming i do know that there's some other providers out there that are building some of these at the time and uh we we the faa are very excited about the project and getting some of these put in other places now you're muted chris good cap all right so um chris bauer let me just to to you've been looking at all the questions coming in uh choose your adventure pick a question in there you thought was the most compelling and interesting that you got in today that you think is the most important that the people listening in those 90 people that are still tuned in what would you like them to hear about the questions coming in um if you know what you need and you can't get it either because of budgetary restrictions within the government or reach out to us let us take a look at what your your challenges and see if there's an alternative solution that could be deployed to satisfy your your requirements and they seem to run the gamut between challenges with loas accessibility to airspace not having the routes that they need um and maybe creating an ecosystem that's not just by one operator but something that could be shared i mean one difference about us as an entity at hughes is we're we're the only public part 97 service provider and there's no reason why we can't produce something as a public that could be spread among multiple users instead of just to you know one particular proponent so that's my uh my thought okay thanks for that chris um all right so we're going to do what we typically do when we close out a webinar with our panelists is we ask him that one question so just a real quick lightning round we'll start with you uh brian if there's only one thing you want folks to take away from your part of the presentation what do you want to stick in their mind as we uh close out today curbs is um although confusing and may put chris to sleep your friend it provides you a layer of protection and that's really what it's all about we're certifying safety by doing terps um trying to fly to locations in sketchy weather is not the answer the answer is to fly ifr get ifr rated get ifr equipped have ifr approaches all right perfect brian thank you for that max i'll punt it over to you from your perspective over there garmin what's the one key takeaway from you the key takeaway for me is to piggyback on brian with all the terps work that they do that we that can't come to life without a navigation database and really that's the opportunity for you as pilots to go out and it's it's not a lot of money annually um but we'll pay you back handsomely for if you ever get stuck and i would encourage you especially if you have garment equipment go onto flygarmin.com take a look at the navigation database options there to purchase and go ahead and equip yourself and keep yourselves safe in the cockpit and as the industry grows and as the industry innovates we're right there with it to make sure that that innovation goes to you the pilots in the cockpit awesome thanks for that max and thanks to garmin for your support okay nolan a message from you take away i will tie right into brian and max in the aspect that ifr flying planned ifr flying not inadvertent imc but planned ifr flying is some of the safest flying you can do when you're a properly trained pilot in a properly equipped aircraft with a plan somebody gives you a departure and in route an approach to landing that has been turped and laid out with minimums it takes the obstacles out of the way and it gives you somebody to talk to throughout the flight support ifr we're trying to do that within the faa right now with the updates i tried to share today and i look forward to the the ifr the helicopter world of the coming years thanks for the opportunity to be here today thanks nolan appreciate that all right chris you helped us set a world record on the longest webinar at hai so congratulations lots of good information to pack in there what's one key takeaway you'd like to leave folks with before we turn it back over to dan um i want to thank you um for your vision of putting this together and the safety aspects that it provides and i know it's a multi-headed nasty medusa but you've done a masterful job along with dan and jim at encapsulating this for the audience my last thought is just listening again to the people up in the northeast you're hearing from us that you want to be safe you want to be methodical you want to do all these things your problem is really accessibility you've got the aircraft you've got the training but you're not getting accessibility to the airspace and um i i think it could be solved but it's gonna take uh it's gonna take a team to uh to do that and if we can help you let us know don't give up all right thanks thanks chris appreciate that dan i'm going to turn it over to you and those 88 people who are still hanging on give them a great thank you for for doing just that absolutely i'm not sure who's more tenacious the presenters panelists today or the audience who stuck with us through this whole thing obviously it's an important topic and it's something that we will definitely revisit gentlemen i want to thank you so much today brian max chris and nolan i can't tell you how much we appreciate your contributing to the safety of our industry by offering this webinar this afternoon uh from the bottom of my heart uh thank you for joining us today thank you dan and we look forward to seeing you all uh again very very soon thank you everybody thanks for your time and tuning in okay i uh we'll finish up just a few uh housekeeping things here real quick uh hey guess what's coming up monday uh this coming monday the 25th registration opens for hai heli expo 2022 in dallas texas uh we hope you guys will join us um obviously there's going to be some great education courses there um looking forward to seeing everybody in dallas uh in next march uh i'm sorry jim did you have something i apologize okay okay upcoming webinars next week save the date october 21st an aviation photography uh how to get the perfect shot this is not only for the people who are riding the back with cameras like me it will also be for a little bit of advice for pilots as well um aviation photography is a very skillful uh occupation and so we actually have three of the best people that i know uh coming to talk with us about it ned dawson from heliops magazine lynn burks from rotocraft pro magazine and mike reno from vertical magazine again three magazine publishers who built their magazines on their photography it's going to be a really great one and then on october 28th we have how to fly neighborly in the bell 206. this is one of the latest ones we have from our fly neighborly committee uh looking forward to having julia back and talking about how to fly more quietly more neighborly in a dell 206 we will have a questionnaire coming to each of you very shortly we do appreciate your feedback we do look for titles and subjects that you'd like to hear about i think this was mentioned more than once in the past and so that's why we wanted to make sure we brought it tell us what worked tell us what didn't work and if there's anything at hai can do to help you in general let us know that too the easiest way to do that is through the email address president rotor.org jim sees all these emails and does task our staff with those as well does wrap us up for today uh for this week we appreciate that you stayed with us for so long uh we're grateful for that and we look forward to seeing you again next week until then fly safe be safe and we'll see you next week

Channel: HAI - Rotor

Views: 1,225

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Id: 7IL5FURID-A

Length: 110min 25sec (6625 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021