Alaska Seaplanes recently rolled out new instrument navigation approaches to a number of Southeast communities.
Alaska Seaplanes ’ Pilatus PC-12, parked on the ramp at Erik Nielsen Whitehorse International Airport Sometimes the ferry isn’t running. So when Haines residents try to catch a flight to Juneau, they watch the sky expectantly, hoping the cloud cover will lift and allow small planes to land. Sometimes, this can last for days.
He said there are two ways to pilot a plane. One is Visual Flight Rules, or VFR, which is often how smaller planes are flown. Pilots use their eyes to situate themselves within the landscape. The other is Instrument Flight Rules, or IFR. That’s the high tech way of flying where the instruments do the tracking. The pilot has to trust the technology, and follow a path — also known as an approach — that is recorded in the navigation system.
“But it’s places like Southeast Alaska that are just so tricky to operate in and out of and there isn’t the same traffic volume that you would see down south, so the FAA doesn’t commit perhaps the same level of resources to producing more exotic approaches that we need,” he said. “Site surveys, terrain surveys, figuring out what is possible to do in the terrain that still meets all the FAA requirements,” Wells said. “And then you have to go out and flight check everything, equip the aircraft with all sorts of sensors, and collate all this data and send it to the FAA for approval process.”
“Once you get to the runway, you have to be able to still see the runway at a certain limit,” Kline said. “But those limits have been lowered based on these new approaches and this new technology. And that’s one of the big reasons why we are able to get in Haines much more often now than we were even just a couple months ago.”
Transportation Alaska Seaplanes Andy Kline Cable Wells Gregg Hake
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