Whatever happened to flying triangular patterns?
Old school.....I love it!
Lost Comm - Squawking Procedure
- Thread starter U-Dog
- Start date
Old school.....I love it!
fish314
Well-Known Member
Whatever happened to flying triangular patterns?
Haha. You could still try it, I guess, but good luck. For me, this one only really made sense if I had a complete electrical failure (or something close) and was in or above IMC.
If it was just radio failure, then I always figured that I would rely on a combination of my NAVAIDS (still working) and my transponder to navigate and communicate my situation. Pretty much everyone (pilots and ATC, both) are at least relatively familiar with the broad brush-strokes of that situation.
If I still had working NAVAIDS but no radio and no transponder (through some strange, simultaneous dual EP perhaps), I could try flying triangles, I suppose, but I wouldn't know if ATC saw it, since they wouldn't be able to communicate w/me to let me know that they saw it. Eventually I'd just have to navigate myself to a landing off the remaining working Navaids. I would have no way of knowing whether I should continue with the triangles because no one has noticed yet, or if I should commence my navigation and approach.
About the only situation where it might make sense to fly the triangles would be over a layer of wx that I know continues for a large distance, when I've lost all radios and all navigation equipment. Total electrical out or electrical fire-type scenarios come to mind. In this case, the triangles are my only means to communicate, and I MUST communicate because I have no ability to fly any kind of an approach into the weather. My hope on the triangles is that they send up an airplane, and I can fly the approach on his wing. Formation through the weather is tricky at best, though, and formation on the wing of an unfamiliar airplane, flying unfamiliar speeds is a last ditch effort to avoid an ejection/bailout scenario (if so equiped) or a blind decent into unknown weather to see if I break out at the bottom before I hit the ground. Heck, I'm probably still better off just flying straight and hoping for an end to the clouds before running out of gas than the trying the triangle thing.
ATC RET 2003
No More Vectors
I only saw the triangles once in my entire career. When it happened, we just figured the pilot was going to do the lost com procedures so we sent someone to look them up.
I guess, as has been said, all the automated stuff that has been introduced since the dark ages has rendered some of the older things unnecessary.
My first radar facility used a 10 channel decoder. If you had someone "ident" it caused the beacon targets to fill in with light for a short while. This was called a "bloomer." Smart alecks back then would key up and say, "If you love Jesus, ident" and the scope would look like a pepperoni pizza.
An emergency squawk was similar to an ident except it had two areas that would fill in, called a "double bloomer" (we were pretty clever with the naming of things) and it was a definite attention grabber. If you saw one, you started the emergency procedures checklist. If it went away shortly, you dialed the thumbwheels to 7600 to see if that was being squawked. if it was, you figured the pilot would start the lost comm procedures--- so we would send someone to look them up...
As has been said, automated facilities display NORDO squawks in an easily recognizable fashion so the triangles and the 7700 then 7600 thing is pretty much not needed.
Unless the automation quits.
I guess, as has been said, all the automated stuff that has been introduced since the dark ages has rendered some of the older things unnecessary.
My first radar facility used a 10 channel decoder. If you had someone "ident" it caused the beacon targets to fill in with light for a short while. This was called a "bloomer." Smart alecks back then would key up and say, "If you love Jesus, ident" and the scope would look like a pepperoni pizza.
An emergency squawk was similar to an ident except it had two areas that would fill in, called a "double bloomer" (we were pretty clever with the naming of things) and it was a definite attention grabber. If you saw one, you started the emergency procedures checklist. If it went away shortly, you dialed the thumbwheels to 7600 to see if that was being squawked. if it was, you figured the pilot would start the lost comm procedures--- so we would send someone to look them up...
As has been said, automated facilities display NORDO squawks in an easily recognizable fashion so the triangles and the 7700 then 7600 thing is pretty much not needed.
Unless the automation quits.
Scandinavian13
New Member
Here I was a few months ago reading part of "Avoiding Common Pilot Errors" by John Stewart (not that John Stewart), thinking *what the heck is all of this airspace? I must've missed something back in ground school. I'm a horrible pilot*
...and then I read the next section that said something along the lines of "they're thinking of re-defining the airspace in terms of Class A, B, C, etc." and felt better about myself.
It was about that point that I flipped back to the beginning of the book to check the date of publication: 1989.