Something Terrifying the FAA Needs to Talk About

I was getting ready to go fly the other day and I discovered something pretty alarming and I followed up with flight service on it and it was down right terrifying I don't think most people know about this in fact I'm sure most Pilots don't know about this so we're going to talk about it [Music] [Music] today [Music] but first I got to head to Boseman and do some flight instruction for the [Music] week also a detailer if anybody uh is interested in moving to the Alpine area we're also considering hiring a full-time um mechanic let me know Lut traffic Back Taxi Runway 31 Lut lights on control check okay oil temps in the green do a run up here as we tax you down to the end [Music] that all looks good controls instruments gas attitude autopilot run up just did switches seat belts safety we are good to go let's go fly you guys God this map is beautiful okay take off checklist complete so the mixture M right there and here we go he's in the throttle into the governing range pull throttle fuel flow looks good everything's in the green Air speed's alive a nice cold day here and we're not too heavy 50 knots basically to be our abort point just Glide right on off accelerate ground effect since density altitude is still pretty high out here yeah we got some air speed we'll get the gear up so we can actually go somewhere and get rid of a ton of drag there I have a lot more power available than power required and I'm on out okay so we're going to accelerate to about 110 knots climb out of that so this is a good pitch attitude giv us some climb and a little gradual acceleration to about 110 probably about what we're trimed for and everything else Contin to look good but yeah if uh you guys didn't know um I'm an ATP CFI cfii uh we do a bunch of instruction in the l39 out here we do upset recovery type training um pretty much anything you can imagine and out here you know the beautiful scenery of Western Wyoming Idaho Utah um come on out do some of that but today I'm headed up to Boseman and doing some instruction in uh customers airplane and going to head up there for the week so the other day I was planning a flight uh I went to the 1800 weather brief flight service website um basicly cuz I wanted to check it out I've been the last two years now uh I've been working on this new efb it's literally going to be the best efb on the planet I can't even wait to share it all with you guys but the first version of it uh is out now and it's all centered around flight data so uh you know in business in life like decisions are always Based on data when we're flying an airplane it's like what what is the information that we have available to us and for so long flight planning tools just really neglect data they're like here are some airports they might have fuel feel free to call all of them and find out what the actual fuel prices are what they're going to charge you in you know handling and ramp these things like that uh and so on and if in our testing basically fuel prices that you find on the internet uh in other apps whatever are wrong about 80% of the time so like they're really really bad it's terrible information you end up thinking oh I'm going to stop here you call that FBO you know you wait a minute for them to pick up and they're like oh actually no our price is like $2 more that hasn't been our price for like two months even though it says it was updated a week ago things like that and then you start calling around and by the time you're done you've just spent like a half hour calling places to find out who actually has fuel where you actually want to stop uh you know God forbid you're going to somewhere with several airports and several fbos uh one might be $150 a night and the other is like 10 bucks a night and so you got to call all of them and half the time they don't even know what their prices are and so it takes like a half hour an hour to like call all these places and figure out where you're going to go it's just a massive waste of time and so the first thing we're solving is data so you can go plan a flight and know that we have reliable uh fuel prices and FBO data everywhere you just play them on the map we also have hours so if you want to stop somewhere and you want to get full service fuel or you want to know what the cheapest full service fuel is somewhere because it's the middle of winter and it's freezing cold outside you don't want to stand there fueling the airplane or maybe it's the middle of summer you don't want to sweat your ass off for a half hour feling the airplane from some slow self-service pump you can filter by just what's the what are the least expensive uh full service prices around and that's open at a particular time or maybe you need to stop at an FBO and know that there's a restroom available you can see all of that easily on the map by filtering by hours uh by type of fuel type of service things like that and see all the information and know that it's always up to date this is just the first step we've also got highest resolution navigation charts of any app out there it's really the first efb that's just designed to be on your on your phone like you can see everything on this large screen you don't need some massive iPad here that you're fumbling around the cockpit because it all just works here we get the interface out of your way so you can do things you can interact with the map super high resolution and use the entire screen not just a tiny portion of it anyway you can get that at 8fl Aviator decom link below link up here go check it out sign up get a one month free trial it's only $60 a year for all this data if you save an hour planning one flight uh you know it pays for itself right there so uh awesome new app check it out this is just the beginning we got a ton of new features coming uh basically new releases every week uh with even better data more data and a ton of other features that are just going to make the entire flight planning experience the most seamless thing you've ever done has been working around the clock uh for the past several months to get this release ad and we're about 80% of the way to all of the other releases anyway that's why I went to the flight service website the other day I wanted to kind of see you know what they're doing lately uh if you're like most Pilots you probably haven't gone to 1 1800 web.com in years um there are just apps that do all of that much much better terrain terrain there are just apps that do all of that much much better uh but there are still essential services that flight service provides uh and some of that it turns out is is only through the website and requires that you have an active account on the website so if you're like a lot of Pilots especially out here in the Mountain West in the back country you use some sort of uh satellite tracking device for search and rescue purposes to be able to communicate out of Self Service mean out here like today on this flight to bosan um there's no radar coverage most of the way where we can't even talk to ATC over here um below about 10,000 ft you know there's nobody that knows where we are or that we can talk to unless we have some sort of satellite communication so I've got a spider track in the airplane so that uh basically my satellite position is is sent every minute um and you know a few friends and family things like that a few emergency contacts basically can uh you know see where I'm at see where I was at uh but most importantly uh about 5 or 10 years ago all these Services rolled out features where you could integrate with flight service so that they get position updates that they can view if they need to for search and rescue purposes is fantastic in basically the entire Western half of the country because if you go missing you're probably not going to be on radar uh certainly not where you went down you might have a you know 20 M search radius which is massive uh in order for somebody to find you if they have any location to go off of at all instead you can have these satellite services share that information it's really fantastic I've been doing that since day one so when I logged into my I went to log in on 1800 weather brief the other day I couldn't log in it wouldn't let me log in it said like no account found I thought well that's weird and so I tried to like reset my password and it's like no there's no account associated with basically the only email I use for that kind of stuff and uh so I created a new account and it didn't have any information in there um I had to go back in and add the airplane I went into like their you know surveillance enhanced search and rescue features uh to check on the spider tracks integration and there was nothing there so I went to add it re added it I thought well you know now it's probably tagged to that air playing versus them just having gotten it so this is better um tried to add it in one other spot which is really confusing cuz it showed in one spot that it was added in another spot that it wasn't um and there it wouldn't let me add it cuz I just added it there and so I thought well that's weird I shouldn't have been able to add it in that other place if it was like already registered or something and so I emailed flight service to ask them about this I was like hey you know what's going on would my information have not been available what happened and basically they told me that a while back they didn't really say when if you hadn't logged in for a 2-year period which again is you know nobody's using this website anymore um if you hadn't logged in in a 2-year period they deleted your account and they would not have had access to that satellite tracking information for search and rescue purposes which I just thought was terrifying you know the whole time I was flying around thinking somebody's always got somebody always knows where I am uh you know if I go missing like flight service can immediately find out exactly where I'm at and initiate search and rescue and it turns out that is not that not the case for some unknown period of time I never got any alert I went back and checked um I had never gotten an email from blto flight service saying that my account was you know uh in danger of being deactivated or even that it had been deactivated or anything like that was totally not communicated and so I'm sure that nobody knows about this um because why how how would you um and so if you're using these satellite services one it's really important to go log in maybe create a new account and re-register everything so that search and rescue you can see where you're at um but also this is something that needs to be communicated much more broadly than this like tell people you know uh I think the FAA should put a word out about this I it's a massive safety hazard uh that Lidos flight service created now um don't get me wrong like flight service is is super useful um there's a ton of of really good use cases uh it's still vitally important and those flight service briefers are are crucial uh one other important thing to note is that if you're flying up in Alaska where flight service is completely separate it's still run by the FAA in really really really topnotch um they use a kind of a separate system for integrating that sort of tracking information there's a form online uh I'll link it in the description and it's linked up here where you can go uh download this form fill it out and give it to one of the flight service stations up there uh I've talked to them you can also uh put like a link to the you know tracking link uh in the remarks in a flight plan uh when you when you file that with them so that they can access that if they need to uh and so on in all these cases flight service never uh you know is is checking up on you or tracking you uh other than if they need to for search and rescue purposes so it's not really a privacy thing it's just a you know you've gone missing they need to figure out where you are and this gives them the tools to do that so one if you don't have some satellite tracking device and you fly anywhere that's not completely flat uh you should get one and you should have it running and linked with flight service uh whether you're down here or up in Alaska and uh if you already do that go back and make sure that it's actually registered because it turns out lios just deleted all your data and wasn't going to have that accessible to anyone for search and rescue purposes so super critical for safety go check it out and uh we're not even at 125 yet here to head on our way to Boseman but so far beautiful day it's smooth as can be Tetons are looking perky as ever it is so much fun to fly out here and you know one other important thing to note about these satellite services you know some people say well you know my iPhone lets me do you know satellite SOS now or you know I can use one of those tracking devices once I'm on the ground or heav LT whatever um those all assume that you can get a good signal which is really hard with a lot of those devices they use these really low power satellite signals they're very high frequency and they uh don't P of trade you know trees mountains things like that at all um so you can't really rely on that once you're on the ground somewhere um but something like this gives people breadcrumbs all the way up until you can't communicate anymore um and so that's that's another reason that important to not only rely on being able to communicate after the [Music] fact temper 16 5 28525 2 time 20 34 s hotela you can just continue that turn uh for the left Base rway number [Music] two to hold of foring holding 48 contct Big Sky got that Big Sky [Music] 4

Channel: Matt Guthmiller

Views: 87,643

Keywords: flying, aviation, flight vlog, airplane, landing, airport, pilot, pilot vlog, takeoff, cockpit, matt guthmiller, pilot life, beechcraft bonanza, beechcraft, general aviation, air traffic control, flight planning, airport restaurants, airport data, flight plan, foreflight, flight service, flight service station, leidos flight service, 8flight, pilot app, mountain flying, mountain search and rescue, aviation search and rescue, aircraft emergency, atc audio, flight training

Id: dcEX5Bxx6f0

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024