It is not uncommon for air traffic control to pose this question to pilots on IFR flight plans approaching certain airports when the weather is VFR. In daylight, when the visibility is good, the winds calm, and the pilot familiar with the airport—and the approach is a straight in—the visual is no big deal.

But throw in weather, fatigue, low light, pilot unfamiliarity, and a circle to land, and it’s a different event.

Honeywell Aerospace is trying to mitigate these risks, expanding its navigation database to offer flight management system (FMS) guided visual procedures as a stand-alone option.

According to Jim Johnson, senior manager of flight technical services at Honeywell, the visual approaches are created in collaboration with Jeppesen. The instructions for the guided visuals look like Jeppesen approach plates but carry the caveat “advisory guidance only” and “visual approach only.” In addition, the symbology on the approaches differs in a handful of ways.

“The FMS-guided visual provides a lateral and vertical path from a fix fairly close to the airport all the way down to the runway,” says Johnson. “You can hand fly them or couple them to the autopilot.”

Visual into KTEB

One of the first guided visual approaches was created for the descent to Runway 1 at Teterboro Airport (KTEB) in New Jersey.

The airport sits in a very industrialized area with the runway blending into warehouses and business parks. Honeywell provides a video of the visual approach on its website that illustrates the value of having that helping hand. Having the extra vertical and lateral guidance from a mathematically created visual procedure allows pilots to better manage their approach, configuring the aircraft in an expedient manner to avoid “coming in high and hot” in an improperly configured aircraft.

• READ MORE: Going with Glass: The Mother of All Panel Upgrades

This is quite helpful when the aircraft needs to circle to land, says Carey Miller, pilot and senior manager of technical sales at Honeywell.

“Going into Runway 1 at Teterboro on the visual, you are not aligned with the VASI,” Miller says. “There is no vertical guidance, which can lead to a dive to the runway. Add a moonless night or gusty winds, and it can be quite challenging. Not being able to see the airport is a detriment to your energy management. The visual approaches, when coupled to the autopilot, eliminate the guesswork and the overbanking tendency that can lead to stalls.”

Adds Johnson: “The aircraft will fly constant radius turns, [and] you will be on the same ground track every time because the computer knows how to manage the vertical and lateral path. It gets rid of the pilot drifting down or turning early because of the winds.”

Airspace Guidance

The guided visual procedures created thus far have come from suggestions from Honeywell customers, including a visual approach to Chicago Executive/Prospect Heights Airport in Wheeling, Illinois (KPWK). KPWK is in Class D airspace, 8 nm from Chicago O’Hare International Airport (KORD). The Class B airspace for KORD sits above KPWK. There is a V-shaped cutout with various altitudes over KPWK.

The guided visual can help the pilot avoid clipping the Class B airspace during the circle to land—and the dreaded phone call with ATC that results.

The Creative Process

Each approach is created using software tools that take into account the airspace and terrain at the airport, then test flown in simulators to check for flyability.

According to Johnson, the suggestions for where to offer the guided visual approaches come from their customers.

“There are a lot of secondary and regional airports in the U.S. that have both terrain and airspace considerations that make visual approaches very challenging,” says Johnson. “For example, Van Nuys, California [KVNY], has both airspace challenges and a ridge nearby.”

• READ MORE: All Flight Jackets Tell a Story

In some cases, the team may opt to create a visual approach as an overlay to improve safety at airports where closely spaced simultaneous approaches are in use. As this issue was going to press, Honeywell was working on an approach to Runway 28R/L at San Francisco International Airport (KSFO). The visual approach has a briefing sheet with textual guidance, and Honeywell has literally drawn a picture of it.

During development each procedure is flown in a simulator, using a specific briefing sheet that is checked and double-checked for accuracy and usability. Each approach has the ability to be coupled with the autopilot.

Miller cautions it is important to recognize that the visual procedures are not considered instrument approaches in the traditional sense.

“Do not request it as an approach, because ATC will not be aware of it,” Miller says. This information is emphasized on the procedure briefing sheet that accompanies each guided visual approach.

The guided visual approach is loaded in the FMS just like an instrument approach. The pilots can access them with a few pushes of a button, just as they do Jeppesen approaches.

“To use the visual approaches, the customer needs to have a Honeywell-equipped aircraft, and in addition to the FMS database, for an additional $2,000 per year they receive the visual approaches,” says Miller.

To request an approach, contact Honeywell at FTS@honeywell.com. It takes approximately four weeks to put one together.

Coming Full Circle

In many ways, the visual approach procedures represent a modern treatment to the first approaches created by Elrey Jeppesen—yes, that Jeppesen—who became a pilot in 1925 at the age of 18. At the time, there was no such thing as maps purpose-built for aviation. Pilots relied on road maps—which often weren’t terribly accurate, following railroad tracks from town to town or by pilotage and dead reckoning.

In 1925, Jeppesen went to work as a survey pilot and by 1930 was working for Boeing Air Transport, the precursor to United Airlines. This was decades before air traffic control and electronic navigation systems were created. Jeppesen bought a small notebook and filled it with information about the routes he flew. In it there were drawings of runways and airports and information that pilots needed to know, like the elevation of water towers, telephone numbers of farmers who would provide weather reports, and dimensions of the runway and its distance from the nearest city.

In 1934, this evolved into the Jeppesen Company and the notebook into the en route charts and terminal area procedures we know today. Much of Jeppesen’s flying was done in the Pacific Northwest. The Museum of Flight in Seattle is the keeper of the Elrey B. Jeppesen Collection, and for many years there was a replica of his first notebook on display in the Red Barn.

We think Captain Jepp would appreciate how far the approaches he inspired have come.

This column first appeared in the January-February 2024/Issue 945 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Honeywell Crafts Safer Approaches Through Technology appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In North America, flight activity during the 15th week of the year totaled 56,798 sectors flown by business jets, which is down 5 percent compared with the same period in 2022. During the last four weeks, activity has been 11 percent below last year’s level. Also during week 15, operations under Parts 135 and 91K declined 9 percent from a year earlier, the WingX report said.

According to WingX, 91 percent of business jet departures in North America take place in the United States, where sectors are down 11 percent since last year. Departures in Mexico were down 1 percent and Canada saw a decline of 23 percent.

The downward trend is similar across the most popular business aviation airports, with Teterboro, New Jersey (KTEB), the busiest in the region for business jets, saw an 11 percent decline compared with last year. Activity at Palm Beach (KPBR) fell 6 percent, Dallas Love Field (KDAL) is down 8 percent and Miami-Opa Locka Executive (KOPF) is down 12 percent, WingX said.

Among aircraft types, the Bombardier Challenger 300 and 350 so far have completed the most flights this month, but its total departures have declined by 7 percent compared with the same period last year, WingX said. The Embraer Phenom 300 is the only aircraft in the top three that flew more sectors this year than last, according to the report.

Worldwide, business jets flew 70,657 sectors during week 15, which is a decrease of 4 percent from the same week a year earlier. In the last four weeks the global trend for business jet activity fell 9 percent compared with the same period in 2022, WingX said.

The post Business Jet Activity Declines in April Compared With Last Year appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

My own Teterboro experiences go back a ways—a long ways. With a newly minted private pilot certificate, I first rented a Cessna 172 at what is now Atlantic Aviation in the fall of 1967, just 55 years ago. In those days, there was no Class B airspace over LaGuardia, Newark, and Kennedy airports (KLGA, KEWR, and KJFK, respectively). I was living in a dorm room in Manhattan. To get to Teterboro in order to rent an airplane involved a subway ride to the port authority bus terminal and a bus ride to the airport or, I should say, to the corner of the airport. The FBO was a good half-mile walk from the bus stop.

Once at the FBO and standing in front of the rental desk, I would declare myself suddenly current. I don’t remember the price exactly, but it couldn’t have been much in today’s dollars. Since I didn’t have much cash, I only did this two or three times a year. After all, I’d have to have the money, the weather had to be good, and an airplane had to be available.

I remember only a few flights. One was at night. You could saunter up and down the Hudson with abandon at 1,500 feet, and nobody could tell you any different. The lights of the city dazzled. Another memorable flight was during the day. I invited a cute girl from class, made a big show of knowing what I was doing, and took off. Once the Manhattan tour was over, I found myself over the George Washington Bridge, peering west into the late afternoon haze looking for Teterboro, the reliable airport from which I had departed just minutes before. The field was nowhere to be seen. Was I aware that both Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart had been able to find Teterboro without difficulty? No.

I headed towards where I expected Teterboro to be, saw nothing, and lost my nerve. Newark airport had to be out there somewhere too, so I headed back to the bridge—my last known position. In the 1960s, the air around New York could be foul and visibility poor. When the hour rental was almost up, I forged into New Jersey and hoped.I was almost over the tower when I saw it. That cute girl and I were married two years later.

Education, work, and the Army took me west and I didn’t see much of Teterboro until 1973, when I bought a Beechcraft Musketeer while stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. We could fly nonstop to Teterboro to see our families. That 581-nm trip could take up the better part of the day, but the exhilaration lasted for months.

Jobs in St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois, followed, as did increasingly capable airplanes, but Teterboro seemed to remain a constant. Then a classic American event occurred: Both my family and my wife’s family left New York. We had no reason to fly to Teterboro anymore.

I did have one memorable Teterboro trip 20 years later. By then, I had moved to Tampa, Florida, and was in search of a Cessna 340. I found one on the ramp at Teterboro. I flew commercially in the dead of winter to look at N6828-Charlie. The airplane sat forlornly at Meridian (an FBO on the west side of the airport), covered with snow. My excitement at potentially owning such a magnificent beast overwhelmed the gloomy skies and raw wind. I was in love.

That airplane served us very well for five years—we were based at KTPA, the big airport in Tampa—but still, there was no recurring reason to fly to the New York area.

All that changed in 2013, when I quit a surgery job and got hired by JetSuite, a Part 135 operator out of California. Assigned as a first officer to the Cessna Citation CJ3, I was in heaven and about to become intimately familiar with Teterboro airport, its surrounding burgs and restaurants, and most notably, its nearby hotels. Suddenly, I was in Teterboro at least once a week, sometimes three times a day.

I developed a favorite room selection at the Embassy Suites in nearby Secaucus. I knew just what to order in the breakfast line. I commiserated with other professional pilots billeted at the same place. Sometimes we’d check out in the morning, fly to Boston, Massachusetts, West Palm Beach, Florida, and back, and check back into the same hotel—sometimes even the same room.

Most of the time we were at Meridian, sometimes at Atlantic Aviation. In winter, it was cold and raw. In summer, it was hot and humid. Sometimes you had to wait for hours for your clearance to taxi, sometimes there was a ground stop. Sometimes we were No. 14 for takeoff. Sometimes we were issued new routing as we inched to the takeoff runway. This could make us tight on fuel. I got comfortable with the ILS 6 circle-to-land Runway 1 approach, even on wintry nights. It must be respected, though—it claimed a Learjet a few years ago even though the weather was good and it was daytime.

I experienced an interesting go-around or two at Teterboro. One was when I was the FO. I was the pilot flying and the captain was the pilot monitoring. We were cleared (again) for the ILS 6 circle-to-land Runway 1 approach. When we checked in with the tower, we were “cleared for the visual, Gulfstream departing prior to (our) arrival.” 

The tower frequency was then completely occupied by a clearance correction for another aircraft. At 200 feet, I said to the captain, who had been trying unsuccessfully to get permission to land, that we should go around. He concurred. That caught the tower’s attention. Challenged, I keyed the mic with this explanation: “No permission to land, congested frequency.” We were cleared for the downwind, no questions asked.

Now, I fly into Teterboro occasionally in the Citation CJ1 that my wife and I own. These are Part 91 trips. I always want to be on my game and professional. When I call the tower, I include our parking information. I try to maintain requested airspeeds for separation. Last week, we got a great view of Manhattan on that ILS 6 circling approach. Most pilots of private jets know this magnificent sight, including the Freedom Tower, only too well. After a soft landing, it was “left turn on Delta, Charlie, Quebec, Gulf, hold short of 24.” We were marshaled to Meridian’s front door. All those flights, all those sights, and all those years flooded the windshield of my mind.

The post The Famous, Infamous Teterboro appeared first on FLYING Magazine.