Friday, December 11, 2009

Speedbirds and Maple Leafs!

Que tal como estan?

Some weeks ago I found a British Airways Captain Blog, who flies Boeing 777s all over the globe.
"The Flying Scotsman" is his Blog title. I found it thanks to Captain Doug Morris' Blog "From the Flight Deck". It is very cool to see how blogs are connected. It creates a net of aviation blogs I always like to read. They give me the motivation I need to continue my career and of course, I learn tons of new things.

Now studying in Hamburg for a german certificate (just one semestre to go), I am, have been, and will be totally concetrated on reaching my goal: To be an Airline Pilot.
I have a PPL and now I'm going to ground school for the PPL-(C), for gliders. Some of my friends have finished CPL training (with IR and MeR), but my goal is to fly for Lufthansa. It's a big goal for a guy born in Guadalajara, Mexico and it requires time and patience. If not training for a license or rating, I study everything aviation-related on the internet, books, etc. Nothing stops me from learning more and more to achieve that goal...

The Standard Instrument Departure

Hi, this post will be about Standard Instrument Departures (SID) or also known as Departure Procedures (DP). It has been a long time since I wrote about charts, so here it is:

Hamburg Runway 23 Departures (German AIP format):
The Jeppesen format is the simplest one, but I want to post different kinds of formats.
On the upper part of the chart, the transition altitude, variation and the airport frequencies are published. The transition altitude is 5000ft. That's standard for Germany. The variation is 1° East. More about transition altitude and variation later.
As we can see, the chart shows a top view of Hamburg and it's departure procedures. It may seem confusing at first, but it's very easy to understand and interpret a SID chart. The lines point to different Fixes or Navigation Aids. Those Fixes or Nav-Aids are the points where we finish the departure procedure and continue flying on an Airway. The departure names are designed with the Navigation or Fix of the departure followed by a number and a letter. For example IDEKO2B: IDEKO is the departure fix and 2B is the number and letter that indicates this departure is from runway 23 at Hamburg. Every runway (and some airports) has the same departure fixes and that's why they assign a number and letter.
We can see some Restricted Airspaces between the fixes IDEKO and ULSEN. Maybe there are some military bases over there or something important. ED-R 31 extends from Ground Level to 14500ft Mean Sea Level.
Our Minimum Safe Altitude (MSA) is 2100 feet, on a radius 25 NM from the HAM VOR. This chart is on a scale of 1:1 000 000, meaning that 1cm in this chart equals to 1000000cm (or 10km) in reality.

So how do we fly a departure?
When making the flight planning and routing, the departure fix or nav-aid is selected. In this example I will choose the BASUM9B (Basum Nine Bravo). Remember that this chart only shows departure procedures from runway 23.
As we take off, we must fly direct to the FU NDB (350.5), or 5.5 DME from ALF (115.80), on the track of 229° to intercept the 235° Radial from HAM VOR (113.10). As we reach 38.0 DME from HAM VOR, we make a left turn to intercept the 208° Radial from LBE VOR (115.10) and fly to BASUM. BASUM is 60 DME from LBE VOR. Our Minimum Altitude on this departure is 4000ft and you can see the 4000 written parallel to the lines.

There are two pages for each departure on the German AIP. This is the second page of this runway departures:
It explains the route to follow of the departures. Shows instructions such as climb to 5000ft and contact Bremen Radar. It also shows remarks for the different departures.

Well, I think I've told everything there had to be explained. I hope you didn't get bored reading this.

Goooood bye.