Doesn’t the Navy always fly a 4 degree glide slope?These are nothing new, we’ve had these for many decades now, getting from the high altitude environment, all the way to landing. Used to fly these all the time, which for us was namely for fuel conservation, with often nearing fuel mins on missions, in aircraft that can’t afford to be leveling off for that reason.
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Doesn’t the Navy always fly a 4 degree glide slope?
Also the PC12 has a note for high angle approaches, I think it’s 6 degrees? But we weren’t approved so I never bothered to learn it.
This approach looks to be about 600ft/NM… is that roughly standard for a high ILS? I honestly know almost nothing about this type of stuff.
Didn't they try this in Singapore a few years back and it failed? Most RNAV STARs already try to do this and I can count on my fingers the number of times I flew an entire descend via without getting other instructions in between
There are some places that pull it off every day, and some (like almost anywhere in the US) that suck at it.
most places in the world design their airspace to accommodate airlines first, everyone else second, if there even is an anyone else.
Maybe you should try harder![]()
why?
Article says MCI and OMA are on the list to get these procedures.
I frequently fly the RNAV arrivals into both these places and have never been able to figure out why we can't proceed direct to the field, descent at pilot's discretion. Not much traffic at either place, yet ATC and the STARs typically bring us down low much sooner than we need.
We have RNAV arrivals into most of our major airports in SoCal, and except for LAX, all of them are given descend via, except maintain. It kind of negates the whole purpose of it….but we also have so much traffic coming together over a few routes that having everyone just descend procedurally wasn’t really possible. Case in point going into BUR we give you via the ROKKR except maintain 110. But we have to do that because arrivals from the western side of FIM are going in at 090, and departures coming out over FIM are at 100. There’s just too much traffic to safely have A/C descending via on their own through all that.
I’m just a center guy, but the speed instructions we give on the IRNMN are always necessary. That arrival routinely will have heavies from Asia sandwiched in between SKW and ASA both going crazy slow. If we just issued descend via and watched it, no chance we even hold separation when ANA is doing 550 over the ground running over a SKW doing 250 knots until the first published speed.
All these things work in environments like the lab, where things don’t go wrong and there’s no traffic and no wind. But like most things in the FAA, once you get to the floor and live traffic,it all changes completely. All these theoretical procedures to have an airplane glide down with their engines idle from FL400 to landing 24R at LAX go out the window.
ANC has some beautiful STARS that feed directly into the approach from the west. Works perfectly almost every time, but planes from the west are almost always of similar performance and it’s not that busy of an airport.