Page 22 - JULY 20 TNT

Jet Journal
IFR Oddities
When I earned my Instrument rating, it was common to include the phrase “No SIDs/No STARs” in the Remarks when filing an IFR flight plan. Partly we were being cheap. In those days you had to buy stacks of paper charts and books even for a single IFR flight, and the SIDs (Standard Instrument Departures) and STARs (STandard ARrivalS) were sold as a distinct series of books. Many personal, recreational and business pilots simply didn’t want to spend the money. Many also assumed SIDs and STARs were something jet pilots do. We piston pilots didn’t need the added complications. By including “No SIDs/No STARs” on our flight plans we knew controllers would not assign us those procedures.
by Thomas P. Turner
Like many pilots, I tended to find a way of doing things and then stick with it, including this flight plan notation. Then one day I flew from Wichita, Kansas, to Addison Airport northeast of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. I filed “di- rect” route southbound in that LORAN-equipped speedster. I included No SIDs/No STARs in my IFR flight plan. As I crossed the Red River that forms that part of the Oklahoma/ Texas border, I was assigned a new clearance: direct to an intersection, then a series of additional intersections to the airport. I hastily copied the new clearance and then dug out the Low Altitude Enroute chart to try to find where in the world these might be.
I must have taken longer than I should because the con- troller soon came back with a vector to the first fix. I turned on the new heading and finally found the intersection well to the northeast of Addison. From there, I found the two additional fixes in a roughly direct line southwest to the airport. Not being intimately familiar with the rental’s LO- RAN (a failing for another time), I couldn’t insert the new waypoints. So I deleted the active flight plan and plugged in “direct to” the first fix. I’d do this for each intersection as I passed the last until I was proceeding direct to the airport.
When the time came to depart, I filed LORAN Direct to Wichita. Clearance Delivery gave me a long set of instruc- tions that began with a heading to intercept a VOR radial, then to an intersection, then along a new radial to a VOR, and then “as filed.” Once more I scrambled to find all this on my enroute chart, then concocted a way to navigate myself along the prescribed route. Feeling pretty good about my ability to make this all up and fly it, I completed my trip and was home for dinner.
I was talking to one of my flying mentors about this af- terward. He showed me his book of SIDs and STARs for the Dallas area. Basically, the arrival controller made me fly a STAR and the departure controller made me fly a SID. The level of difficulty was not in the procedures themselves but in my lack of preparation. It would have been far easier for me to have the charts available and to have included them in my IFR flight plan, instead of trying to figure them out in the air. Now it’s far simpler with SIDs and STARs available
20 • TWIN & TURBINE / July 2020 Jet Journal
STAR into Addison, TX. It’s undoubtedly different from when I flew the trip described in the mid-1990s, but I flew something akin to MONTE – ROPSS – FINGR and then vectors to KADS.
SC-2, 23 APR 2020 to 21 MAY 2020
SC-2, 23 APR 2020 to 21 MAY 2020