Hey guys, Jon from Fly8ma.com and today we're going to be going
over the basics of VFR sectional charts.
Wo we have our VFR sectional chart pulled up here we're looking at the
Venice Airport and let's just look at some basic things that we see around
here. So the first thing we notice is all these different shaded areas. We have
some yellow around here and we have this light greenish around here. Well the
yellow just means congested areas or areas with lots of buildings and homes,
basically cities. Easy to spot at night. They're typically all lit up easy to
spot during the daytime too. This is all swampland in here. That's what all
these little tiny little sprout things are. That just is a symbol that means
many lakes and then all in here is going to be built up with lots of roads and
houses as we look over here we see magenta Airport in Venice Airport and
magenta and that means it's a non towered airport. We can look over here
and see Punta Gorda it's blue that means it is a towered Airport. We notice the
Class D ring the blue dashed line here class Delta ring and we notice this hazy
magenta ring around here haze image entering denoting that the Class C
airspace comes all the way down to 700 feet here where everywhere else out here
Class E airspace is all at 1200 feet and it's Class G below that. So at Venice
it's Class G airspace from the surface on up to 700 feet and then above that
Class E airspace out here Class G from the ground up to 1200 and then Class E
airspace. We can see here we've got let's use Punta Gorda for an example there
Class D airspace this blue ring goes up to 2500 feet so 2500 feet msl and so far
at say 3,000 feet msl and we're above their airspace were clear of the class
Delta we can look here and we can read that this is for the Punta Gorda Airport
and they identify or for Punta Gorda is PGD. They have a control tower CT and
that frequency is one to one. Point zero has a star
there meaning that that's a part time control tower at about 10:00 p.m. that
control tower closes and we could check that time in our AFD or airport facility
directory, that little green booklet, or on your iPad that'll tell you what time
the tower hours of operations are. Then we have this little blue symbol here next
to all this and what that means is when the tower closes the seat a for common
traffic advisory frequency is going to be one to one point zero. If we come back
to Venice over here we notice that this seat a frequency is one to two seven two
five. There's no control tower in Venice so it's just one to two seven twenty
five all day long and all night long. Over here we have an ASOS an automated
surface observation station at Punta Gorda to get weather information from
that frequency is one three five point six seven five. So we would dial that
frequency into our comm radio the left side of the panel typically to either
talk to the tower or listen to the a sauce. The field elevation is twenty-six
feet above sea level.We have lights at the airports over coming in there at
night it's lighted but it's got a little star next to that aisle and what that
means is it's um lit part time or lighting limitations exist is the
technical term lighting limitations exist what those lighting limitations
typically are is well the lights turn off and to turn back on you'll have to
click your mic three times five times or seven times within five seconds and by
clicking the microphone making that pop-pop-pop sound frequency it'll turn
the lights back on. Three times low five times medium seven
clicks four high. The longest runway we have available at Punta Gorda is 7,200
feet we could look over here at Venice and notice the longest runway we have is
five thousand feet. The one two two nine seven five frequency down here there's
not a scene next to its not an a sauce frequency what that is is the Unicom
frequency. So that frequency is what we could use to contact the FBO when we're
20 miles out and ask them to have a rental car ready for us or ask them you
know what the price of fuel is or any sort of services you need from the FBO
you would contact him on that frequency. And same thing in Venice the FBO you can
see that the if you also use this as the Unicom frequency as well as the seat
typically towered airports don't want you calling over tower frequency for
things like rental cars and stuff like that so they have a separate frequency.
Therefore that we can notice here that we have these little dashed lines coming
from our circle we have them at Venice as well and then we notice that this is
just perfectly round here at Coral Creek. What those little squares are, are little
lines coming off there it denotes that there's services available at the
airport. Typically that the airport has fuel or maintenance services available.
So if you're looking for a place to land you wouldn't want to go here. That's
private anyways we can see Pvt means private but we could go to LaBelle, we
could go to Punta Gorda, we could go to Venice. So we could expect to find some
fuel there not to say that it's open 24/7 but during the day you could expect
to find a fuel pump somewhere there. We also see at Punta Gorda we have this
little star here. We've got another star over in Venice. Those stars mean that
there is a rotating beacon in service from sunset to sunrise all night long.
So we'll see how white and a green flash as we're flying towards the
airport. It's like a lighthouse but for airplanes and so that's a lighted
rotating beacon on the airport. They also typically turn that beacon on during the
daytime when the weather's below VFR so if you see it going at noon or 1:00
o'clock and it's bright daylight outside probably means the ceilings awful low or
visibility is very low. How we're going to use this sectional chart navigate is
we're going to identify landmarks. This whole idea of a VFR sectional chart is
that it's visual in nature. So VFR sectional: all visual. Well we had some
great visual identifiers. We have a highway running into another big highway
interstate. Here we can see Interstate 75 there so that's very easy to see that
intersection there we've got towers that show up to let us know there's towers in
the area and these are the heights of the towers 330 feet MSL 601 feet MSL 586
above sea above ground level rather 601 feet above sea level. So it looks to me
like the ground if we did some simple math there the ground is 15 feet above
sea level. Here we've got another Tower 269 feet MSL. We've got a big tower up
here and they change the symbol for the big tower. They make it 17
49 and if it's over a thousand feet tall its this taller tower all these little TPS
are just a thousand feet or less, so when we see this big tall symbol here 1750
foot that's a tall tower you're going to want to be probably thousand feet above
that thing to clear it and be nearly 3,000 feet just to clear a tower and we
can see here that the ground elevation in that area is still less than 100 feet.
So it pretty close to sea level still there. We also see some rivers here we
could use to identify in some bridges. Bridges are great identifiers as well as
some passes. Wwe can see where we'd have a big pass there. We have Stump pass here.
We don't see those names on the chart we just know that from living in the local
area but it even denotes all these little islands for us another little
bridge here. So very easily identifiable things. Another pass up here so when
you're along the coastline or you're really when you're flying anywhere you
can always find a river and a road that intersect intersections are great to
identify yourself intersecting roads here we have railroads these little
things with the hash marks across though I guess that's supposed to be their
version of railroad ties. so railroad pass them through the town of Arcadia so
we could probably find a railroad follow that into the town we'll see all the
buildings around with swamp land all around. Look just to the south east of
there and we'll find the airport. So very easily identifiable things is what
you're looking for in the sectional chart we even see some different
airspace over here some MOA's which we'll get into later in another video.
Some military operations areas and restricted airspace and also we'll take
a look here at class charlie airspace. That's a solid magenta ring so class
Charl airspace around Saracen airport here it's got a little bit of echo
airspace that comes out to the surface right there and we have bravo airspace
all around the Tampa area and this is the Tampa class bravo. Several rings kind of
like an upside down a wedding cake shape that we talk about in our airspace
videos which we all put some links in down in the description so you can learn
all about class ABCD in E airspace as well as G airspace there's no F airspace.
Other little things to note on this sectional chart, lakes are great things
to reference but they're not going to put every little lake on there so
smaller lakes probably won't be on there. If it's a half mile or a mile across you
can expect to see it on the chart probably. We'll also take a little quick
look back here to our airport symbology and we notice here we have rp13 what does
rp13 mean? Means right pattern for runway one three and we have this little
depiction here of the runways of Venice and now this isn't totally current we
don't actually have runway nine two seven anymore it's been closed for many years
they still kind of have it depicted on the chart there but we would check the
AFD and a current AFD would let us know what runways we do in fact have, this is
just a rough depiction. And we would know runway one three heading this way is
right traffic. Where all the other runways like three one are left traffic.
We can also look over here and the last thing we'll talk about on the sectional
chart is our VOR, so we see this compass rose ring around this Class D airspace
let's get some other class tiers basically see what one looks like
without a VOR. So we find a nice little Class D Airport over here on the other
coast. We can see they don't have that compass rose they don't have a VOR
on the airport even though it is a Class D Airport with a ceiling of 2,500 feet
msl control tower one two zero point four so let's go ahead and look here at
Punta Gorda Airport and we'll see we have this little dot that's the location
of the vor on the field and then this compass rose letting us know that we
have a vor there in here vor frequency Punta Gorda vor the identifier for it
the Morse code identifier for it which we'll talk about later and the frequency
you would dial into your nav radio typically the nav radios are on the
right side of the instrument panel and you'll dial in 110.2 and that
would give you the Punta Gorda vor then you can turn up your nav radio volume
and listen to the Morse code identifier if you want. You could contact St.
Petersburg radio, St. Petersburg flight station on 122.025 we'll talk
about flight service later on in our course, but that's the basics of our VFR
sectional. VFR sectional visual reference. We have some railroad tracks. We have
we have rivers and we have big interstates we can use all to identify
where we're at along with the towns and cities other airports make great
checkpoints and of course our barrier islands are very helpful as well. Hey
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