Sometimes I find it hard to argue with my friends who call me a hillbilly. I do indeed live in a small town in the hills that has no pub, no service station and no restaurants. The local train, I kid you not, is pulled by a steam locomotive. We also don’t get a mail delivery, which means every Saturday morning we have to visit the quaint, compact post office to collect our mail personally.
A couple of Saturdays ago I was handed a large white padded post bag that I knew contained my CASA Flight Planning Kit. Within a few minutes I was back in my lounge room having split the post bag and strewn the contents all over the table.
Gotta tell you: this little pack is a great idea well-executed. The contents are intended to be reminders that there are a lot of things to think about when planning a flight, and the thinking doesn’t start when the prop turns; it can start up to a week or so before departure. The pack covers personal minimums checklists, the eight stages of flight planning, fuel calc’s and non-towered airport procedures. All of this is contained in a flight planning guide, a kneeboard, flight planning pad, spiral-bound flight planning guide, six D-class aerodrome diagrams and a small pocket-sized folding flappy book.
Firstly, thanks CASA for decent sized aerodrome diagrams, even if at A3 they are probably too big to play origami with in a busy cockpit. But by design you can see the intention: to stop runway incursions at the capital city GA airports. The diagrams are large, clear and have the critical points clearly marked. Good to see.
The metal kneeboard will certainly help cockpit organisation, as will the planning form pad. Unfortunately CASA’s desire to highlight the fuel issue has perhaps rendered the pad impractical. About 40 per cent of the pad is dedicated to fuel tables, leaving only eight rows for the route grid. With the normal practise of leaving one blank line between route segments, the route is limited to only two intermediate waypoints. This could have been thought out better, especially when a separate laminated fuel calc chart is also thrown in.
The spiral-bound planning guide is a good attempt to wake pilots up to critical issues. Everyone should read it; you will find something in there that pushes your guilt button because you haven’t given it thought in a long time. It is augmented by the laminated fuel calculation chart and a personal minimums checklist. Well done; laminated things last longer and are therefore less likely to fall into disuse when they get tatty.
But, someone at CASA needs learnin’ in literature. Throughout the guide there are several pull-quotes used to highlight the main message. One of them is from W.B. Yeats: “I balanced all, brought all to mind”. Many flyers may recognise this as coming from the poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. Appropriate for a booklet on aviation safety? I think perhaps not.
You can order your kit through the CASA website for the price of the postage.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch
