Flying with out-of-date information

[Rich]

Beware. This is something of a rant.

Over the years I've had occasion to notice folks flying with out-of-date charts and other firms of information. I'm not talking about a pop-up NOTAM, TFR, or something like that, but often with stuff that became obsolete sometimes years on the past. The most recent and egregious one I've seen I didn't experience myself. It was a contributing factor in a fatal mid-air in Sept. 2016 in Georgia between a Beech F33 and a Diamond DA20. It was, in fact the most recent fatal accident involving a Diamond in the US. The Beech pilot was using the wrong frequency for CTAF, apparently based on an airport information card that was 7 years old. The CTAF was changed 5 years before the accident. So he's blissfully calling out position reports to no one who needed to know. And falsely secure in the knowledge he wasn't hearing any traffic at his intended destination (CTJ) on the radio, he apparently didn't feel it necessary to be vigilant in visually confirming what he "knew".

I've actually heard pilots opine that having charts and other information expire every 28 days, or 6 months or whatever is simply a conspiracy to extract more money from us poor beleaguered flyers. I once got a ride to the Denver area from Idaho Falls to pick up my Cherokee. I didn't notice that he was using a 3-year old Denver Sectional. He couldn't figure out why he wasn't receiving the DEN VOR. The reason was that said VOR had been moved and the frequency changed for obvious reasons - two years before. When I pointed this out to him he was dumbfounded.

I also know of several pilots that fly with outdated databases in their various electronic magic boxes to save money. Hope that works for them.

[gordsh]

This happens a lot in the designated practice area where a few flight schools including mine do aerial work. Ever so often we will be practicing stalls, steep turns etc and a non flight school airplane will wiz by us. Funny enough its usually an out of town Cirrus pushing 180 kn's heading into Toronto, totally unaware of the local areas designated for training and most importantly designated frequencies for the area. They wiz by, try to raise them on the frequency and nothing. They are either ignoring me or not on frequency. For this reason my plane is heading for Avidyne TAS 605A install shortly.

[Rich]

With regard to civilian training areas, in the US I know of no way to readily obtain information on these. To my knowledge you'd have to contact every individual airport flight school along any intended route. They may be marked on a map on the airport wall(s) and handouts at the FBO counter, but I haven't seen any real publications anywhere.

[Lou]

Interesting. In Canada, most training areas are designated on charts. You can download the Designated Airspace Handbook to look them up and check for hours of operation and frequencies.

[Colin]

This is one of the reasons I *love* ForeFlight. It is always up-to-date on my phone and iPad.

[Rich]

This is one of the reasons I *love* ForeFlight. It is always up-to-date on my phone and iPad.

It even has that trick where you load the info for the next cycle a few days ahead of the transition date. It then stores both cycles and presents the applicable cycle info for "now". I kind of wish my GNS units would do that, but noooo!

And last summer, where we had firefighting TFRs all over the area, and they kept changing location and boundaries, they got updated in essentially real time.

That said, there are still certain things that don't show up because they're simply not published, like practice areas. And like the mysterious circle marked on a chart on the wall at my home airport that shows an area north of RDM as "Do Not Fly". Widely ignored, but some influential property owner got this put there.

[Rich]

Today there's little excuse for flying with published information that is out of date. But it was not always so.

Those of us who have been around awhile can recall a time (and it wasn't all that long ago) when it was a real challenge getting full information on airports and other facilities. Everything was on paper and mostly we bought charts from the local FBO and rare was the outlet that had charts beyond the immediate area. Oftentimes even if they did carry charts you might need they'd be out of them. You could get subscriptions or mail (and later internet) -order them, but an impromptu flight was a real problem. So you wind up getting stuck with what you had. In those thrilling days of yesteryear, there were occasions when making a halfway lengthy trip I would make an extra stop just to get my hands on information appropriate to where I was going

Even farther back, getting your hands on an applicable A/F Directory was almost impossible. There might be one for your region hanging from a string in the FBO, but often it was out of date: "The new one hasn't come in yet". I even encountered cases of the phone-book effect, where someone would actually tear pages out of the one sad-looking book to save them the hassle of copying down the relevant information.

I have a suspicion that the miscreant flying the Bo may be one those folks that simply refuses to use the internet for any purpose. (I admit to a biased assumption due to the fact that this guy was 79 years old.) This is the critical conduit we all use to stay up-to-date. Otherwise, it's still 1977.

[Colin]

I had the little brown books when I was training and crossing the country the first few times. They had a LOT of information. I am sorry that the company wasn't able to figure out how to transition to the new age.