Hey guys.
Jon from fly8MA.com, and today we're going to be looking at a little pretend flight here,
that we planned from Venice to Punta Gorda to the Melbourne Airport.
So we're going from a non-towered airport, to a towered airport-- to a Class D towered
airport, up over to Melbourne airport, another Class D airport.
We're going to look at the sectional chart and all the applicable things to our route
of flight on this sectional chart.
So we're going to start off here in Venice.
Let's just say this flights at night.
Well, in Venice, if we take off and we have to turn back the the airport it'll be really
easy to find because we're going to see a bunch of city lights in this yellow area.
And we're going to be able to look out here and see a red-- I'm sorry, a white and green
rotating beacon at the airport.
That's on all the time.
We can look over here and we can see that there's lights at the airport, and there's
a little asterisk telling us that there are lighting limitations.
Those limitations are probably that it's pilot controlled lighting, and we would confirm
that in the AFD and look at the actual airport information.
We do in fact know that at Venice, we use three clicks to put the light on low, five
clicks for low, and seven for high within five seconds while clicking the mic.
They'll turn the lights on at the airport, so we will have runway lights, taxiway lights,
and we'll have that green and white rotating beacon on the airport to help us find it.
We'll have weather information on 119.275.
Say the weather's not working, we could set our altimeter to about 18 feet since that's
the field elevation, if we can get the altimeter setting.
We'll turn the lights on with clicking the mic.
We've got at least a five thousand foot runway, that's the longest runway available there,
not every runway is five thousand feet, but the longest one is five thousand.
So we can probably try to use that to take off of.
Ad we can call the unicom, call the FBO, if we needed fuel or anything like that on this
frequency here.
We can also use that as our CTAFfrequency because we have that little "C" with the magenta
background.
That's our Common Traffic Advisory Frequency we'll call all the other aircraft on.
Notice here that its right traffic for runway 13, so if we take off from runway 13 and we
were staying on the pattern for any reason, we'd want to make right traffic.
As we depart the airport, and we start flying on our heading down towards Punta Gorda, we
could navigate there by means of a VOR, because we see we have a VOR compass around here.
What radial would we want to dial in?
Well, we want to go too the station, so we'll look at this little VOR compass rose.
Remember, this compass rose?
See how it's slanted off here a little bit at that angle?
The true section lines are here.
That's a line with true north, and this is magnetic north, so the VOR compass rose is
actually printed on the map a little cockeyed to account for that five degrees of west magnetic
variation.
So, it looks like we're going to be about a 295 or so from the station--298.
That would mean that we're probably about a 118 heading to the station out of Venice,
for our VOR.
And then we could, if we were landing there, call tower about 10 miles out on 121.0.
Now if this was after 10pm, we could look up and we see that this is a part-time tower
with that star there.
We look in the AFD, find out the tower closes at 10pm.
We would just go ahead and use this 121.0 as our CTAF.
Again, we have pilot-controlled lighting limitation.
So probably three clicks, five clicks, and seven clicks to determine the lighting intensity.
We could get our weather information on 135.675 for the airport.
Elevation is 26 feet.
The longest runway they have available there is 7200 feet, and unicom for the FBO is 122.975,
and we can look up some of the information for the airport before takeoff and determine
that.
The FBO is open 24/7 so if we need any services we can call them 24/7 on that frequency.
You can get fuel, or a rental car, or anything else.
It says here see NOTAMs directory for Class D/E service hours.
So we'll look in the AFD or NOTAMs to see what times the tower is open and closed for
Class D/E surface hours.
Notice that the AFD is now called a chart-supplement.
So if you're looking for something and you find chart-supplement, that's actually the
AFD, they just changed the name pretty recently.
We notice here that we're leaving the Class D airspace, and lets assume it is still Class
D airspace, tower still open.
So we fly out here we have Class E airspace from the surface on up.
As we get out here if we're at 1000 feet, we're in Class G airspace, once we're above
1200 feet, we're back in Class E airspace, and our visibility requirements change accordingly.
So as we're flying out here at night, we would see a whole bunch of nothing out here.
We would see the town of Arcadia lit up nicely off to our left, we could use that as a checkpoint.
And as we approach here, it looks like we're going to be going through the Lake Placid
west MOA, we're going to need to call up the controlling agency and we would find that
on the side panel of our VFR chart.
We can go over here to the side chart and find out who controls the Lake Placid east,
north and west MOA is Miami Center.
So we want to get a hold of Miami Center.
I don't necessarily know what frequency for Miami Center, so we're going to have to find
that out somehow.
We could either look all over the chart and try to find that.
Or we could simply just look at an IFR chart-- we'll get into those a lot later.
But we would want to somehow contact Miami Center.
So let's say we don't know how to contact Miami Center, we don't know what frequency,
can't find one on the chart anywhere.
Well, we would just call up the flight service.
We can find frequencies for flight service and they can provide us with the frequency
for Miami Center in that general area so we can get a hold of them.
We can look over here, and it looks like Sebring has an RCO, or "Remote Communications Outpost"
for St. Pete flight service-- St. Petersburg radio on 122.25.
So we can go ahead and call them up before we get there, make sure that the MOA is cold.
Not that we need to make sure it's cold to go through it, but we don't really want to
fly through a hot one.
We want to make sure that it's cold although we could go through it anyway.
Now, we do have to make sure the restricted area is cold, and we can go through it.
So we'll talk to Miami Center about that before we bust on through there.
And then we'll continue on course over on to Melbourne, where they have a Class D tower.
Let's go ahead and go back to our whole world VFR chart there.
So, they've got a Class D Tower, and it abuts the Patrick airforce base-- Class D, so we'll
want to watch out for that, and not go too close there.
We could navigate from Punta Gorda to Melbourne using a VOR it looks like.
So, we could use the Punta Gorda VOR to get away from Punta Gorda, and about halfway there
or so, we could change over and go to the Melbourne VOR.
And the Melbourne VOR frequency we find right up here: 110.0.
We got our morse code there, and all that.
The channel 37 simply means that there is DME available-- that's more of a military
thing to worry about.
And these other frequencies here: 243-- you may notice that your radio in your Cessna
150, or whatever you're flying, doesn't go that high.
That's because that's a military frequency and we don't have to worry about it.
So, we could also contact St. Pete's flight service here on these frequencies above our
VOR box.
They can receive us on 122.1, and we can receive them over the Melbourne VOR if we turn up
our Nav-radio volume.
So we're going to go ahead and go into Melbourne, let's look at the information here.
Looks like it's another part-time tower-- they may close at some point and we'll have
to again see the NOTAM's directory for Class D/E surface effective hours.
So we'll look at that chart supplement, AFD, to figure out when the tower opens and closes,
to figure out if you're going to call up ten miles and say, "Hey Melbourne Tower, Cherokee
9907 Whiskey, we are ten miles to the southwest with information Delta."
Or you can just listen to the ATC, and then contact CTAF, we notice that CTAF is the same
frequency after a certain time at night.
And notice that the airport elevation is 33 feet.
Lighting is pilot controlled.
"102 feet" is not actually one hundred and two feet, that's actually ten thousand two
hundred.
10,200 feet is the longest runway they have in Melbourne.
They've got some shorter ones there, but 10,200 feet is the longest one.
And if you want to check what the other runway lengths are and what the numbers are, check
your AFD, and it will tell you.
And 12295 is the FBO frequency.
Now, AFDs have become a little bit of a thing of the past.
People don't always carry thos paper charts around anymore.
A lot of people use iPads or Android tablets, Garmin Pilot, and Foreflight, and those are
great because we can just click on it if we were using the app and click on Melbourne,
get some information, and look at all the information it gives us.
It gives us all these frequencies, it gives us the runways they have there, 9 right and
27 left, 9 left, 27 right, the distances that they are, the widths, all sorts of information
that's really really handy to have.
Even fuel prices and things like that if your tablet is connected to WiFi or data, somehow
or another.
So, that is how we would get there.
We're looking-- we probably want to pick some other checkpoints-- what could we pick for
checkpoints?
We have some lakes, we have some little towns, remember those little yellow areas are probably
going to be lit up at night.
We're going to have some towers that we could choose to use as checkpoints, but a single
tower standing alone is really hard to identify.
So, we'd want to pick like two towers to the left of our flight path, and two to the right
that we should see at the same time.
We'd want to pick a group of very tall towers or two towers all by themselves amongst a
bunch of swamp land might be easy to identify.
So things like that, that are very easy and clear to identify.
Busy roads, interstates, could be good at night.
But some of these smaller, less traveled roads may not be so good.
So things like this, you may not have any cars on them, probably not any street lights,
and it would just be totally black.
So, how about the altitude we're going to fly over there at?
Well, let's look at our chart and we can see some minimum elevation figures here, "MEFs",
these numbers here.
It's showing us that in these quadrants, the highest obstacle is 700 feet, 800 feet, 1700
feet over there, 1900 feet over where we're coming from.
So it looks like since we're heading to the east, and we need to be on an odd plus 500,
3500 would be pretty appropriate, maybe if the winds favor it, 5500 feet.
It's at night, it'd be great to have some extra altitude, and on such a long flight,
5500, even 7500s not unheard of.
Remember they do recommend supplemental oxygen above 5000 feet density altitude at night.
Something to consider.
But that is the basics of us navigating from Venice to Punta Gorda, to Melbourne via our
VFR Sectional.
And all the things we're going to encounter along the way.
Hopefully that was helpful.
If you have any questions at all, leave them in the comments below.
Make sure you subscribe to us so you can get all of our latest episodes, and give us a
thumbs up on this video.
Like I said, any questions, leave them in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching, make sure you share us on social media, Twitter, Facebook,
all those great sites.
If you can't fly everyday, then fly8MA.com.
We'll see you all next time!