A/FD and sectional errors

RotaryWingBob

RotaryWingBob

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Remember what your CFI always told you? That the A/FD had all the latest info?

Not so, I guess.

I was planing a flight into Millville, NJ (KMIV) today, and the current sectional, Philly TAC and A/FD all show CTAF as 123.65. That's the old Millville Radio freq., and I was pretty sure it was wrong. Williamsport FSS didn't have a clue. I finally called one of the FBO's at KMIV and sure enough, CTAF is 123.0.

Your tax dollars a work...
 
Bob,
Please understand that changes to sectionals, TACs and AFD's take a bit of time especially when the changes occur as new documents are going to print. That said, these NOTAMs hit the street exactly when MIV AFSS pulled down for good.

KMIV MILLVILLE MUNI[Back to Top]</U></B>
!MIV 09/070 MIV AFSS DCMSND WEF 0609160000
!MIV 09/071 MIV CTAF 123.0 WEF 0609160000
!MIV 09/072 MIV LAA OTS WEF 0609160000
!MIV 09/083 MIV CD AVBL 123.65 WEF 0609160001
!MIV 09/085 MIV RCO 121.5 OTS

You can find these and a whole bunch more active NOTAMs at www.faa.gov. Hope your flight went well.
 
Fast n' Furious said:
Bob,
Please understand that changes to sectionals, TACs and AFD's take a bit of time especially when the changes occur as new documents are going to print. That said, these NOTAMs hit the street exactly when MIV AFSS pulled down for good.

KMIV MILLVILLE MUNI[Back to Top]</U></B>
!MIV 09/070 MIV AFSS DCMSND WEF 0609160000
!MIV 09/071 MIV CTAF 123.0 WEF 0609160000
!MIV 09/072 MIV LAA OTS WEF 0609160000
!MIV 09/083 MIV CD AVBL 123.65 WEF 0609160001
!MIV 09/085 MIV RCO 121.5 OTS

You can find these and a whole bunch more active NOTAMs at www.faa.gov. Hope your flight went well.
Click to expand...

The thing that actually displeased me was that the briefer couldn't come up with the NOTAMS.

Actually my wife and I had a great flight -- I had never flown a helicopter over the pine barrens of NJ, and we did all kinds of sightseeing at about 700 agl over territory that I've covered most of in kayaks or on foot. Topped off by a great lunch (as always) as KMIV :yes:
 
dammit...i just bought the new sectionals for our area 2 days ago..i gotta check that out....

millville is my next stop..i hear they are going to start building a large motorsports park there soon..i wanna check that out....


Ant
 
RotaryWingBob said:
Remember what your CFI always told you? That the A/FD had all the latest info?

Not so, I guess.

I was planing a flight into Millville, NJ (KMIV) today, and the current sectional, Philly TAC and A/FD all show CTAF as 123.65. That's the old Millville Radio freq., and I was pretty sure it was wrong. Williamsport FSS didn't have a clue. I finally called one of the FBO's at KMIV and sure enough, CTAF is 123.0.

Your tax dollars a work...
Click to expand...

You must have gotten a bad briefer.

Williamsport FSS told me about this a good year ago, when the roof fell in.

It's sad that the A/FD is wrong.
 
Joe B said:
Complain! Lockheed-Martin has a web site which takes complaints. A real person will investigate and email you back. http://www.afss.com/

Regards,
Joe
Click to expand...

I did this. What I got was a huffy phone call from the manager of Leesburg defending his briefers and explaining in detail why I couldn't get the data that I needed from them.

What we've got now is a company trying to run FSS like a business combined with CYA government responses. The worst of both worlds rather than the best.

Having said that, I've generally had excellent experiences with Williamsport. Leesburg is getting much better - they seem to recognize airports and navaids in NJ now and are able to use the data. They just are missing the local flavor that Millville had - like being able to tell us whether or not McGuire's areas were hot.
 
What a lot of folks forget is that a "standard briefing" only nets you the unpublished NOTAM's, i.e., those temporary NOTAMs that will never be published and those permanent NOTAMs not yet published in the NTAP. Since the shutdown of MIV AFSS was permanent, once the NOTAM to that effect was put in the NTAP, it stopped showing up in FSS and DUATS briefings.

There are only three ways to get the "published" NOTAMs:
  1. Ask the briefer for the published NOTAMs in addition to the unpublished ones. This will usually make the briefer grumpy, since s/he has to go find the NTAP on the bookshelf, open it up, and read it to you.
  2. Go to the FAA web site listed above.
  3. Get a subscription to have the NTAP mailed biweekly to your house.
Other than that, you will not get the published NOTAMs. Note that the FAA holds the PIC responsible for all NOTAMs, published and unpublished. Caveat aviator.
 
Last edited:
Ron Levy said:
What a lot of folks forget is that a "standard briefing" only nets you the unpublished NOTAM's, i.e., those temporary NOTAMs that will never be published and those permanent NOTAMs not yet published in the NTP. Since the shutdown of MIV AFSS was permanent, once the NOTAM to that effect was put in the NTP, it stopped showing up in FSS and DUATS briefings.
Click to expand...

Is this the place for published NOTAMS?: http://www.faa.gov/NTAP/ I didn't see anything about the radio changes for Millville in there. They do pop up on a Duats briefing, though.

Regards,
Joe
 
Ron Levy said:
What a lot of folks forget is that a "standard briefing" only nets you the unpublished NOTAM's, i.e., those temporary NOTAMs that will never be published and those permanent NOTAMs not yet published in the NTAP. Since the shutdown of MIV AFSS was permanent, once the NOTAM to that effect was put in the NTAP, it stopped showing up in FSS and DUATS briefings.

There are only three ways to get the "published" NOTAMs:
  1. Ask the briefer for the published NOTAMs in addition to the unpublished ones. This will usually make the briefer grumpy, since s/he has to go find the NTAP on the bookshelf, open it up, and read it to you.
  2. Go to the FAA web site listed above.
  3. Get a subscription to have the NTAP mailed biweekly to your house.
Other than that, you will not get the published NOTAMs. Note that the FAA holds the PIC responsible for all NOTAMs, published and unpublished. Caveat aviator.
Click to expand...

Ron,

I believe DUATS will show both published and unpublshed notams. I just got a briefing for a fake flight to MIV and got this back:

Millville NJ [MIV]: September NOTAM #71
Common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF) 123.0 effective from September 16th, 2006 at 12:00 AM UTC (0609160000)

Millville NJ [MIV]: September NOTAM #70 Automated flight service station decommissioned effective from September 16th, 2006 at 12:00 AM UTC (0609160000)
 
JustinPinnix said:
Ron,

I believe DUATS will show both published and unpublshed notams. I just got a briefing for a fake flight to MIV and got this back:
Click to expand...

No, it won't. Exception: where the data is refreshed in the computer system.

The HYI ILS was out - and the associated runway closed - for about 9 months. Once it was published, it vanished from DUATS. FSS didn't provide the info unless you specifically asked.
 
JustinPinnix said:
I believe DUATS will show both published and unpublshed notams. I just got a briefing for a fake flight to MIV and got this back:

Millville NJ [MIV]: September NOTAM #71
Common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF) 123.0 effective from September 16th, 2006 at 12:00 AM UTC (0609160000)

Millville NJ [MIV]: September NOTAM #70 Automated flight service station decommissioned effective from September 16th, 2006 at 12:00 AM UTC (0609160000)
Click to expand...
As noted earlier, my guess that the MIV NOTAMs were published was incorrect -- someone looked and they were not in the NTAP. Therefore, you should get them from both DUATS and a "standard" briefing from FSS, and your result was as it should be, whereas the briefing provided to the original poster was not according to Hoyle.
 
Ron Levy said:
As noted earlier, my guess that the MIV NOTAMs were published was incorrect -- someone looked and they were not in the NTAP. Therefore, you should get them from both DUATS and a "standard" briefing from FSS, and your result was as it should be, whereas the briefing provided to the original poster was not according to Hoyle.
Click to expand...

DUATS help confirms what you said earlier, so I guess I learned something today.

I can't believe that after the 30+ pages of crap I get on every DUATS briefing, there's still more stuff I'm supposed to go look up myself! I'm glad our government is saving us $0.0003 per briefing by not transmitting that extra data. Gheesh!

Followup question: since this happened over a year ago, why haven't these NOTAMS been published?
 
JustinPinnix said:
Followup question: since this happened over a year ago, why haven't these NOTAMS been published?
Click to expand...

The roof fell in on Millville just before Lockheed took over the FSS contract. Both the FAA and Lockheed agreed that it didn't make sense to rebuild Millville in light of Lockheed's plans to centralize flight service. So Millville's monitoring and communications functions were put on the "fast track" to be remoted to Lockheed's centralized AFSS in Leesburg. "Fast track" isn't that fast in real world terms but the government still considers the current situation "temporary."

As to why many long-lasting "temporary" Notams never get published I haven't a clue. Millville isn't unique in this regard.

Regards,
Joe
 
Tune in 123.0 and you'd know in about 30 secs. You can barely get a word in edgewise with all the Millville traffic now. I wish they had assigned something like 122.9.:D
 
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