Nearest airport with a certain type approach

Vince R

Vince R

Pre-takeoff checklist
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Mar 14, 2017
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Southport NC
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Vince R
Simple question: how would you find the nearest airport having a certain type of instrument approach?

Let’s say your cruising along and you have a sudden failure of your Garmin 430’s, leaving you with nothing more than an old, dusty ADF and a handheld radio. Is there an easy way to find the nearest airport having an NDB approach (without just asking ATC)?

Or, maybe you’re an instrument student and you want to practice an LDA approach, or maybe you’re planning your long cross country and you’re hunting for a VOR approach near a particular route. Same issue - how would I find airports having whatever I’m looking to fly?

I guess I’m looking for some sort of app where I can filter the airports shown on a map by type of approach, etc...gotta be a better way than paging through terminal procedures, or looking at random airports in ForeFlight.
 
There isn’t an easy way, to my knowledge. At least not in FF or any of the online flight planning apps. Typically you have to open up each airport and see what approaches they have. Your best bet is to look at towered airports, which more often then not, will have a time least one ILS/LOC approach. NDB approaches are becoming real dinosaurs. You used to be able to look at the IFR enroute chars and see a NDB symbol over an airport and have pretty high certainty that they have an NDB approach...not anymore—they are being phased out at a high rate.

I’d use my iPad to fly an approach in an emergency over a silly handheld radio that had a VOR/ILS receiver functionality.
 
Last edited:
What is wrong with asking the controller? Less distraction from your basic job of flying the airplane to look things up.

Bob
 
bobmrg said:
What is wrong with asking the controller? Less distraction from your basic job of flying the airplane to look things up.

Bob
Click to expand...
I agree with ask ATC. That said, if you asked me for the nearest NDB approach you'd have to wait a bit. I'd have to start calling around to all the adjacent facilities to try to find one. We are fresh out of them around here. I'm sure I'd find one eventually. :)
 
bobmrg said:
What is wrong with asking the controller? Less distraction from your basic job of flying the airplane to look things up.
Click to expand...

Nothing wrong with asking the controller, and the more I think about it, the more that seems like the only way if you're trying to figure it out in the air. For instance, at KHTO, there's a published VOR approach that's been offline for several months now...the approach is still in the books, so it would be easy to miss the fact that you can't really fly it unless you had a way to check NOTAMs from the cockpit.
 
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