KPNS

Salty

Salty

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Salty
Flying my first pilots n paws into pensacola tomorrow. I've never yet gone into a class C by myself, so this is going to be a comfort zone expander.

Anything of note about the area I should be aware of?
 
Don’t know about Pensacola. By as long as your talking to them you can enter! The class C’s up here are pretty friendly.
 
benyflyguy said:
Don’t know about Pensacola. By as long as your talking to them you can enter! The class C’s up here are pretty friendly.
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Just have to talk to clearance delivery before ground on the way out again, right?
 
Salty said:
Just have to talk to clearance delivery before ground on the way out again, right?
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First listen to ATIS where they will often have specific instructions for VFR departures. Sometimes it talk to Clearance, sometimes just ground. Say at least direction of flight and altitude.


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Salty said:
Just have to talk to clearance delivery before ground on the way out again, right?
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KPNS is pretty sleepy for a Charlie. Unless you want to pick up flight following out or activate an IFR flight plan, I would contact ground. The worst that would happen is that they would ask you to contact CD. I would pick-up flight following heading into KNPS, to eliminates some of the guess work anyway. They're pretty laid back there. Enjoy it. If you get RWY35, you get a pretty cool approach.
 
labbadabba said:
KPNS is pretty sleepy for a Charlie. Unless you want to pick up flight following out or activate an IFR flight plan, I would contact ground. The worst that would happen is that they would ask you to contact CD. I would pick-up flight following heading into KNPS, to eliminates some of the guess work anyway. They're pretty laid back there. Enjoy it. If you get RWY35, you get a pretty cool approach.
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FWIW, in most of the sleepy C’s, the same guy/gal is covering both freqs, so unless it’s busy, it’s unlikely they’ll tell you to switch to CD.
 
Speaking of sleepy places. One class D that will go unnamed (KINT) is my favorite place to play, “the next person that talks loses”.

It goes like this, I make a crystal clear and slow initial call to ground when preparing for departure then wait. Tick tock tick tock. If I repeat the call, no problem. If I don’t, eventually the controller will ask for the last aircraft to ‘say again’ or occasionally indicate my transmission was garbled.

The long delay is so consistent I’ve come to imagine that there is a card game on the other side of the room and it takes a good 10-15 secs to walk across the room to the radio.

Cracks me up but I know that working at a slow facility must be maddenly boring, compared to say NY ATC where the stress could be life shortening. Getting the right people assigned to the right facility must be quite a job.


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Coming from FL to the panhandle? A lot of military fast movers, F22s at Tyndall, everything at Eglin, and a lot of Navy flight training at PNS. Best to check in with Tyndall approach and get FF, with handoff to Eglin and then PNS. Airport itself not that busy however.
 
mscard88 said:
Coming from FL to the panhandle? A lot of military fast movers, F22s at Tyndall, everything at Eglin, and a lot of Navy flight training at PNS. Best to check in with Tyndall approach and get FF, with handoff to Eglin and then PNS. Airport itself not that busy however.
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Yeah, I see that. I planned on FF anyway with a new engine and going to a new place.
 
Bill Watson said:
First listen to ATIS where they will often have specific instructions for VFR departures. Sometimes it talk to Clearance, sometimes just ground. Say at least direction of flight and altitude.
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This ^ is the correct answer.
 
Lot of mil traffic lot of restricted airspace out east just get FF and you'll be fine. Its the weekend so mil guys are mostly off. If it was a weekday then its busy as hell at certain points or 100% dead.

Typical when the NPA and milton guys are up is to get aircraft calling remain clear of the class charlie followed 30 seconds later by cessna xxxx say request.
ATC is a constant stream of
Shooter 1 2 contact mobile on ....
blackbird 1 2 cleared saufley contact approach on ...
Cat 04 contact tower
all you hear is just a 1 sided conversation cause the mil guys on UHF so even if the freq sounds dead theres probably some newbie 25 hr mil pilot trying to stumble through radio calls quick enough not to get the penalty vector.

Cat, Shooter, blackbird(navy marine pilots in t6's), Jedi(usaf CSO nerds) Rocket (t45's) Hunter (usaf pc12 variant)
Shouldn't be to tricky penisacola is chill on weekend. If coming from along the shoreline they might have you fly that south of eglin idk about north though.
Hop over on 123.05 and say what up brian. I'll be in the pattern at 5r4/jka/cqf all day and be on 123.05 till 3pm

Also every one of our old instructors always post their flight plans for KPNS -KCLT
 
We go in there couple times a week. Go in IFR or with flight-following. Pretty easy.
 
Well, that was a long day for sure. It went pretty smoothly, but I did struggle to keep up with the fast talking, mush-mouthed controllers, and sometimes I'm pretty sure they weren't using standard phraseology. Like one said something about 22 hundred, I even asked and didn't understand him the second time. I took a guess at what he meant and said something like "decend and maintain 2 thousand 2 hundred" and he didn't question me, but that is NOT what he said to me. Not even close.

And my clearance out was confusing, they never cleared me for takeoff, or even onto the runway, but just said "cleared for right turn to 100". I read back "cleared for takeoff 08, right turn to 100" and they didn't bark at me, so I went......

Otherwise, very uneventful, the dog was awesome, I should have kept him.
 
Hey, if you get another like that, you can deliver him to me. We’re dog-less right now.
 
Bummer, I was hoping to pull up live ATC feeds and learn some more from this, but looks like they are down for that area. :(
 
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