welcome to session five of ground school USA's private pilot ground school in this session we're going to look at the complex system of aeronautical airspace in the USA hopefully we'll take what sometimes is a little bit troublesome for pilots in terms of remembering all of the ins and the outs of this complex thing called airspace and we're going to take it and break it down so that it's understandable and easy you may know absolutely nothing about airspace but by the end of this session you're going to be an airspace expert you might be a registered pilot looking for a review and simply just want to knock off some of the rust on your airspace knowledge it is easy to get rusty because pilots don't use all airspace every time they fly in fact we're sometimes not even sure what airspace we are flying in I know I've asked many pilots during the flight but that won't be you after this session so let's get started before we jump into the airspace I want to talk just a little bit about the the various charts that we have available there are three in particular worth mentioning the first one and the one most commonly used that you'll use most often is called the sectional chart and you're looking at of course the United States here and how they break down the charting by major cities there's 37 sectional charts that make up the lower 48 states and of course the Hawaiian Islands Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are available as well this these sectionals are double-sided and they're scale is one to 500,000 so they cover some some good distance and they've got great detail on topography and the different kinds of airspace that are will be color-coded we'll be learning all about that obstacles airports just about everything that you want to have on a good chart then there are what's called the terminal area charts or TAC TAC and there in select areas that are the busiest of the busiest areas and they're demonstrated here by these little gray boxes that we see throughout so in the Atlanta area for example you'll have a terminal chart and and that's going to be twice the scale of a sectional in other words one to 250,000 scale so it looks twice as big and in those complex areas it's nice to have that better detail going the other way is the WAC or the world aeronautical chart that scale is 1 to 1 million so if you're planning a long trip and you want to get kind of the bird's eye perspective of your of your trip and your charting and you're planning a whack or a world aeronautical chart is a great thing to use this is a example of a sectional chart there again you can see all of the 37 charts that are available for these regions we're looking here at the Los Angeles sectional chart something important worth pointing out is the these are updated typically every 6 to 7 months in some places like Alaska I believe it's about five months so you do need to pay attention to the the dates and the dates will be listed up here from this date to this date so we're going to take a look at airspace now the FAA breaks up airspace in two kind of major categories or areas the first one is class airspace and that gets an alphabetic designation like a b c and so on and then there's special use airspace this would be like military practice areas or areas that are restricted so we're going to look at both today but first we're going to start with the class airspace system a through g just giving us a little overview this is the airspace a through g except for f there is no F not in the United States anyway and if we start very simply and I don't want you to get overwhelmed with this because I'm going to move fairly quickly but this is just an overview we're going to take each one of these aerospace systems apart and unpack them for you but just as a way of introduction look at the top one here we can see Class A or alpha is a very high air space it starts at 18,000 feet now that's MSL and that stands for mean sea level so a 18,000 feet above the sea and it extends up as high as flight level 60,000 once we get above 18,000 we put things in terms of what's called flight levels and we just drop the two zeros at the end so this is in hundreds of feet we'd add two zeros to that and we get 60,000 feet so you can bet when you're flying in that airliner you're up in class alpha now to be in class alpha you have to be IFR and on an IFR flight plan we'll talk a little bit more about that of course one thing we learned in the previous sessions if you joined us is that above 18,000 all altimeters need to be set as well - - 992 coming below 18,000 feet we get into Class E or echo airspace think of E is everywhere everywhere where there isn't a airport so Class E if you're flying somewhere and you're not sure exactly what kind of airspace you're flying in and you're not near an airport more than likely you can be safe to answer Class E and you'll probably be right we'll look at that as well as we get closer to the ground and near airports that are not control tower airports we get into what's called Class G and that's more uncontrolled airspace and then if we get into tower controlled airports we get into Class B for the biggest one C for the next one down and D all three of these B C and D have and what they have in common is a control tower and yet some of the requirements to get into that airspace are a little bit different so we're going to look at all of this as we move forward in this session what we're going to do is we're going to talk about each of these air spaces in terms of five attributes the airspace dimensions laterally and vertically the requirements to get in what do I need to do to get permission also what type of equipment or are there certain restrictions to what type of airplanes or type of equipment on board airplane in order to get into that airspace we're going to find as well that there are airspace whether requirements we need to have a certain amount of cloud distance requirement or visibility requirements we'll look at that and then in some cases there are some pilot restrictions as to who or what kind of certificated pilot can enter in to that airspace so we're going to break down each of these air spaces again in terms of these five things first off I'm going to start with Class D now that seems like a strange place to start obviously it seems more logical to start with a however we want to look at all the tower controlled airports first let's start there and what we're doing is we're starting with the smallest of the tower controlled airports first and that's the Class D it's kind of the simplest one the airspace is typically kind of a cylinder formation here we have a four mile radius typically but not always so you do need to look at the chart and how the airspace is charted specifically but on average four miles and twenty-five hundred feet above ground level you can see in the sort of 3d picture here of what it might kind of look like on the chart and extending upward technically this airplane that you see in the picture is not in the airspace so he is not obligated to do anything requiring of anything that requires him to communicate or keep the weather criteria or anything else he is outside that airspace and does not even need to talk to the control tower technically although he's awfully close looks like he's going to dip that wing right in it what does Class D look like on the chart it's a dashed blue line this is where not being colorblind is very very helpful so we need to be able to see our colors on our chart and in the Class D we can see we've got a dashed blue line but we also see there's a dash magenta line extending up here let's save that topic for a little bit later but right now we want to focus in on the class D itself now the dimensions would be as charted we'd have to measure that out to see what that actually ended up being but typically again four mile radius and up to usually 2500 feet above the ground now this altitude here in the brackets or in the box is in hundreds of feet and that is not a GL but it's MSL one of the things that you do have to keep kind of in your mind is the difference between MSL and AGL MSL again is up height above the sea or mean sea level and AGL is the altitude above ground level so we said that typically Class D goes as high as twenty-five hundred feet AGL and this number is in MSL now why is it 2,600 and not twenty-five hundred the reason for that is the airport itself sits at seventy two feet above the sea well that's close enough to about a hundred feet so if we take 2500 and add 72 onto it we'd get 25 72 and they simply round it up to 2,600 feet the nice part about that is your altimeter reads in MSL and this number is in MSL so as long as your altimeter is above 2,600 you could be like that plane right above it and you're not flying in it well what do we need to do in order to get into a simple tower controlled Airport like a Class D you need to have two-way contact that's that's what's required now what is two-way contact well that's simply using your your radio on board the aircraft course we're not talking about a music radio but we're talking about a communications type of radio two-way means that you can transmit and receive you also have to have done that in order to get permission to come into the airspace what do I mean well if you transmit it but you got nothing back you didn't receive anything back from the controller in the tower then you are not able to go in to that airspace because the requirement is two-way contact and that specifically means that you address the controller the controller addresses you now here's a key how does he address you he needs to use your end numbers of your aircraft the end numbers are the the registration numbers of the airplane it's written in big letters on the side of the airplane and whenever you make a call on the radio to whoever you're talking to you always start with your numbers of your aircraft it's sort of like your name so if for example we were cessna november 1 2 3 4 5 and I called the controller and he came back and said cessna 1 2 3 4 5 at that moment we've established two-way contact now we expect more from him he should give us some instructions how he wants us to enter his airspace which runway he wants to assign us to land on things like that so those will be all the instructions to follow but the moment that I got my n number back to me that was the moment I established the communications requirement which is the main and really only requirement to enter that that kind of airspace so I can enter that bubble of airspace with that even if he said or she said November 1 2 3 4 5 standby and I give pose that to a lot of students that I work with and oftentimes the answer I get back is no I can't go in I am not clear to enter that airspace and the understanding though is that once they have given us the N number we have established two-way contact we can go in even if they say stand by it doesn't mean stay out it just means stand by for further communications know where you're at I know how you're coming in you can go ahead and do that I'll be right back to you okay now if the controller said aircraft calling in standby now he's used a generic term the word aircraft he has not addressed my end numbers and I'm not good to enter that airspace it's important to have a good understanding of two-way contact that frequency will be on the chart it'll be on various resources that will tell you all about the airport information and the frequency to reach the control tower on of course in order for this to happen you have to have a two-way radio at minimum you need to be a student pilot so there's no really restrictions here on type of pilot requirements student Pyle as long as you've got a student pilot certificate and I would also add that you would need to be signed off from your instructor to go to that airport assuming this is not your home base then you're good to go whether requirements we typically talk when we talk about weather requirements we talk about visibility that you can see forward and how far away from clouds you need to be or remain so in terms of visibility we always measure visibility in miles and specifically the statute mile so we need in Class D we need at least three statute miles visibility and that will be given in the weather report that we can tune in to on our radios before we ever call the control tower to get permission to enter that airspace so we listen to that we make sure we have that minimum now that is a minimum if you watched our last session in session four about regulations one thing I mentioned was the rules are always the minimums a better rule of thumb is for you to pretty much take any regulation and double it especially when it involves numbers like this so if three miles is what's minimum I might be doing better if I choose six for a personal minimum it is up to you as a student pilot you'll be given some limitations from your instructor in your logbook so you don't have a big say in the matter except that you could even exceed that and have even a higher minimum personally yourself but we always recommend that you think about that when you do look at these minimums so three statute miles visibility and then from clouds we need to be 500 feet below a deck of clouds or a thousand feet above them if we're traveling above them now as a student you're not allowed to go above clouds and for a very good reason you might get trapped up there and not be able to come back down except to go through the clouds and that's pretty much an emergency situation so you don't want to get yourself in a pickle like that so recommend staying below and if the clouds are too low to fly then that's just a day that you cancel the flight the other thing is that the distance from the cloud must be 2,000 feet horizontally so just about a half a mile distance from the clouds one of the reasons is we you certainly don't want to accidentally get into the cloud as a VFR pilot that would be very dangerous you could lose control of the airplane but of course we're giving you some training in the Private Pilot that will help you if you get into that situation we do give you about three hours of minimum of training just by flying reference to the instruments if that should happen but the other thing about being close to a cloud is that there might be an IFR traffic that is allowed to be and legal to be inside that cloud talking to a controller and perhaps you're outside of that area and you're not talking to the controller in some cases that plane can come out of that cloud and then there you are facing that airplane so having some distance between you and the cloud is a very good idea so think about it's not just to remain outside the cloud but to give you some margin so that if there is another airplane that comes through that cloud you're not right tangled up with them you
