Opposing Bases: Air Traffic Talk

An amazing show that has increased my knowledge of the NAS and makes me even more eager to continue my training for Instrument, Commercial, CFI and maybe even all the way to ATP. I have begun working my way through the backlog on the fruit player while spending 36 hours a week driving. I recently listened to OB391 and it reminded me of when in my private training on a night xc coming back from doing my tower solos at the delta under the former mob boss bravo now a senator bravo to the thunderbird echo. My instructor had me under the hood since I already had very little reference to the horizon being night with no moon and in the middle of the desert at around 9,500MSL. He reaches over and pulls the power on the flying Hershey bar and tells me to stay under the hood and navigate to the nearest field. Once we were around 3,000-4,000 AGL he tells me we have broken out of the clouds. I took off the foggles and keyed up the lights, found the airport, got set up on final-ish. Once we certain we would make it to the field we powered up and continued on to the thunderbird echo.

At my glider club on a recent bad weather day, hangar talk ensued. The topic was our glider op's separation from an arrival into the nearby Hipster Charlie. I, an instrument-rated airplane and glider private pilot was doing my best to represent the Opposing Bases ethos of good NAS citizenship to a group of glider pilots, most of whose idea of instrument procedures is fuzzy at best, and involves a cell phone with Google Maps at worst. Beyond walking them through the routes and altitude restrictions on the STAR, I filled in extra detail gleaned from this podcast about what the controllers are expecting as Center hands off arrivals to Approach, and Approach launches departures out of their problem at high speed. We covered IFR separation requirements, the limits of radar coverage, the differences between our gliders' primary-only returns, mode C, and ADS-B, and even got into arrival and departure gates around nearby Mount Headwear. It was a great discussion, and as it wound down and we agreed that transponders should be next on the club's upgrade wishlist, our tow pilot (a retired Air Force general and airline pilot) came up and asked, "so, are you a controller?" "No sir, I just listen to a podcast."

Guys awesome show. Thank you, I listened to every show in the past year starting from the 1st all the way to today to improve my ATC skills. but……how did you miss talking about WART, this is extremely helpful to ATC and lets folks training seem like pros. When making a practice approach request, use the WART format. Much like PTAC. Weather, approach, route, terminate. Approach Nxxxxx with approach request. Nxxxxx say request “we have information alpha for Mather, request ILSZ22L practice approach, vectors, full stop or missed”. Maybe you can produce a document of your favorite tips for ATC much like the famous pilot’s cafe for IFR dated Jan2025 but for ATC. Also how about an ATC episode about all the ways to work on ATC skills,(pilot edge, liveATC, SayIntensions, AR SIM, methods, and anything related to practice methods).

Ditto. AG, you’re welcome!