About one year ago, Sporty’s Pilot Shop (www.sportys.com) announced an updated version of an audio tape program they had originally put out nearly 25 years earlier.
The press release from Sporty’s said that “Chicago O’Hare IFR,” which had been used by thousands of pilots to learn IFR communications, had been updated and re-mastered to an audio CD, putting the listener in the left seat of Sporty’s Aztec for a round trip flight from their home base in Batavia, Ohio (near Cincinnati) to Chicago O’Hare—the world’s busiest airport.
The press release for the re-mastered CD went on to point out that, in addition to all the actual pilot-controller exchanges, the listener also gets explanations and IFR tips from an experienced pilot as you follow the progress from preflight briefing to the final landing. The audio CD is 80 minutes in length and costs $12.50.
For me, I wondered about how effective this old style of media learning could be now that most of the available training disks are DVDs crammed with gads of combination audio/visual displays, spiffy special effects and lots of enhanced graphics. Sporty’s also puts out a number of these full-media educational DVDs—and I’ll have more on one of them next month—so it’s not as if they aren’t in that race, too.
But the bottom line here was how effective would a return to yesteryear’s training format of “audio-only” be for a pilot interested in this particular subject? Here’s what I discovered.
First and foremost, I’d really forgotten how many modern day situations make an audio-only CD a really viable option—such as when our eyes are otherwise engaged, but our ears are available. Most cars have a CD player in the dash, so having a useable training aid to listen to on your drive to and from work can be a really effective method of utilizing the commute time. Ditto for a CD player in your airplane, if you’re tooling along VFR but would like to hear what an IFR flight into O’Hare would be like.
My only criticism of the CD is that it was created with only one 80 minute track—one really long song, so to speak—which made it more difficult to back up or advance to a particular section for repeated listenings.
As soon as I put the CD in, I knew immediately from the voice who that experienced pilot from Sporty’s was—Hal Shevers, Sporty’s founder and chairman, with whom I’ve had many a personal conversation. As Hal said, the (original) tape was made on a cold day in February 1978, and I was pleased to see how little some things have changed in aviation the past quarter of a century.
True to its promise, every word uttered by pilot Hal to everyone that he dealt with was on the CD—a telephone call to get an arrival and departure reservation, a FSS weather briefing, the filing of the flight plans.
Just like the real world, Hal had to get back on the telephone to get a “valid time, void time” clearance to depart IFR from his uncontrolled originating airport. In an early disclaimer, Hal talks about how some of the transmissions on the tape are not perfectly clear; again, just like the real world would be. Personally, I found the quality of the audio to be pretty good throughout.
Also, just like in the real world, the controllers are constantly talking to lots of other airplanes and the occasional transmission to Aztec 702SP was just another tick on the moving dog. The value in hearing this sort of thing in “real-time” mode is in the pacing of it all—that’s why a written transcript really wouldn’t work as well.
Frequency changes and controller handoffs occur on the CD just as they normally would, with Hal interjecting a comment here and there as an explanation of what’s going on. Nearly all of what’s said is still as valid today as it was back then although—even though it is still technically correct for today’s pilot—Hal’s explanations of proper VOR tracking techniques and references to channeling the DME reminds us how much easier things are today with GPS and moving maps!
There is also some discussion of the ins and outs of ATC and what the controllers on the ground are actually doing as your radar blip moves across their screens.
When it was time to tune in the recorded ATIS information for O’Hare, I found those moments particularly riveting for two reasons: first, it was difficult to hear the lengthy ATIS information with all the constant ATC chattering in the background, just like it always is when you’re doing it in the real world.
The second attention-getter for me was when an Allegheny Airlines flight checked in on the frequency on its way into O’Hare. It wasn’t my voice from that 1978 Allegheny flight, but it sure could’ve been since my logbooks show that I did fly in and out of O’Hare a number of times that year (that was the final full year of Allegheny Airlines, which transformed itself into USAir in the Fall of 1979—I had already been flying for the company and its predecessors for 14 years at that point).
Speaking of nostalgia, there is lots of it peppered throughout this audio CD as we change over to Chicago Approach Control and listen to the inbound flow of airliners—radio chatter from Braniff, TWA, Allegheny and Ozark, to name a few of the ghosts from aviation’s Christmas Past. The point here is for the pilot who isn’t experienced in big airport operations to get a feel for the timing and flow of what’s going on—there’s a lot of it, but it really isn’t terribly complex and/or frightening when you can hear it firsthand like this.
Hal is constantly putting in some cockpit management tips (“We’re on radar vectors now, so I’ll put both nav receivers on the ILS”) that are practical and worth knowing. As if it were a staged event (and true to O’Hare’s reputation) the Aztec is given a runway change, then another change back to the original again, all in the space of a few minutes. Finally, a visual approach is issued with a clearance to “land on 22R, hold short of 27R.” Hal explains the need to read back the particulars of that landing clearance.
The sound of the touchdown occurs with lots of background babbling to all the other arriving/departing traffic. Taxi in, shut down, make some telephone calls, and then back to the Aztec for the return trip. Listen to the departure ATIS, and then get the IFR clearance.
Hal discusses the need to be ready to go when you get to the end of the runway at a big airport, so he does the Aztec’s runup and most of the cockpit checks at the FBO ramp. The Aztec is then off and running from O’Hare, with radar vectors on course to a Richmond, Indiana en route landing and, eventually, back to Batavia, Ohio. There are a couple of tidbits from Hal on these segments, too, including the approach and landing at a non-towered airport.
If you’re interested in getting a verbal feel of big airport operations, this audio CD more than fits the bill. For hardly more than the cost of your lunch (certainly less than the cost of a decent lunch at O’Hare), you’ll get a plate full of tasty IFR tidbits from Hal Shevers.
Included on this CD is his concluding statement on how much easier it is being on an IFR flight plan than it can be when trying to go VFR. It’s training aids like this one from Sporty’s Pilot Shop that can make Hal’s statement absolutely true for anyone who cares to listen in.
Editor-at-Large Thomas Block has flown nearly 30,000 hours since his first hour of dual in 1959. In addition to his 36-year career as a US Airways pilot, he has been an aviation magazine writer since 1969, a best-selling novelist, and the owner of more than a dozen personal airplanes.
