aviation question

I used to fly out of a small town airport (it was actually a better airport than for most for a town its size; it had two runways, both over 5000 feet long).

A Beechcraft is an expensive plane; it's not unusual for an owner to add advanced avionics of all sorts.

A private airport, or even a small municipal airport, would not normally have the radio range to reach out 500 miles. The FAA (and the international equivalent) assigns frequencies for airports to use and they're typically low power because another airport 500 miles away might be assigned the same frequency (I'm not sure off-hand what criteria they use to determine the range between frequencies). There are also "general purpose" frequencies if I recall correctly.

A plane can "dial in" a variety of frequencies; it might be that someone at your small airport is using the equivalent of ham radio and the plane could receive that signal IF it knew what frequency to listen to. I'm not sure about this. Whether the plane could pick up a signal depends mostly on the power of the signal sent out and how clear the signal is and not what equipment it has onboard. Replying is another matter.

For a story plot, it would be easier to make this work IF the small plane is listening for communications from the private airport. If it's not, it would be difficult to make it realistic I believe. Can you have the airport contact the FAA Flight Service Center and have them try to contact the plane? If it's needed, you could have the small airport lie about why it needs to contact the plane (make up some life threatening reason).

That's not a complete answer, but I hope it helps a little.

ac

A small airport, private or municipal, wouldn't have a control tower; those are only used at busy airports. A small airport has maybe a guy at the airport shack and a wind sock.

You could easy look up the coordinates for the airport in Iceland if you know what city the plane is flying to. I have maps and things, but they're all for the US. Just Google for it.

ac

Long distance flight paths are sometimes refered to as the "great circle route". You might enjoy looking that up.

I have a good friend who's a commercial pilot for an airline. If you have more questions, send me a PM or post them here and I'll forward them to him. He's more up on things than I am. Plus, I basically flew single engine Cessnas in my own backyard, so to speak.

ac

citymouse said:

Thanks again. In the story I don't refer to a control tower. That was just my expression here.
I did the co-ordainates for Philly to Iceland (64° 8’ N 21° 56’ W).
But I recall everytime fly to Rome the plane ends up over Nova Scotia. Skyways never seem to take a straight line. As I said it's unlikely anyone will email me after publication and complain I got it wrong.
MH

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Many pilots have maps that show all Great Circle routes, or many of them, as straight lines. I can't remember the name of that style of map off-hand, but they're not too hard to find.

One other thought on private SST's. After the Iron Curtain started to fall, many former Soviet Block countries sold all sorts of things from their military aresnals - sometimes on the black market, but often sold openly. Quite a few MiGs and other military jets have found their way into private hands. I've heard that the street price for a MiG-21 was around $200,000 for one in good working order a few years ago, without its weapons. Just a thought if you want to give your story some extra plausibility.

citymouse said:

a Beechcraft Hawker 800XP takes off from a small private airport just north of Philadelphia PA, headed for Iceland. Coordinates are: 64° 8’ N 21° 56’ W. ...Are these the correct coordinates for a flight from Philly to Iceland? I believe they are but I want to make sure.

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I'm confused by the question. Those coordinates describe a single point on the earth's surface, not a trajectory over the earth's surface. Those are the latitude and longitude of a specific place, namely Reykjavik... in other words, those are the coordinates of Reykjavik, not of "a flight from Philly to Iceland." And you wouldn't just point yourself towards those coordinates and fly there--that is, you wouldn't fly straight from Philly across the ocean to Reykjavik. The normal process, in a small plane, is to fly over land for as much of the trip as you possibly can, so you would fly up the eastern seaboard and Newfoundland before heading out over the north Atlantic to Iceland. You fly over land in order to be able to land for refueling, eating, and peeing, and also in case you run into problems and need to land. (Most pilots are hyper-vigilant about safety... they're not going to head out over the ocean without good reason, unless they're what you call a "bold" pilot, but as the aviation saying goes, "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.") I don't have any idea how far a Beechcraft can fly without refueling, but you can check that with the manufacturer.

citymouse said:

Would a small private airport have the radio range to contact a plane 500 miles out, assuming the plane could even pick up the signal?

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I highly doubt it, but I defer to anyone else here who's more knowledgeable. One reason I doubt it is because there is normally no reason for a small airport to contact a plane that's that far away, and vice versa. If a small plane is in trouble and needs to contact an airport, or if it needs weather updates or whatever, it will contact the airport closest to it, and airports are much more frequent than one every thousand miles (that's how far apart airports would have to be for a plane to be 500 miles from the closest one). And if planes are being guided by air traffic controllers (which wouldn't be the case for small planes unless they were landing at major airports or flying in really congested airspace, but I'm just mentioning this as an example of how communication with planes is handled), the planes are vectored from point to point by different controllers--like, controller A covers such-and-such an area, so he vectors planes within that area, but when the plane leaves that area, controller B picks it up.

AND small planes generally don't fly at particularly high altitudes, so you're more likely to run into topographical issues that make radio communication over long distances impossible. Or, to put that more succinctly... hills! But then again, I have no idea how high the plane you're writing about flies.

Hi,
I'm a pilot of a DC8 frieghter. It seems that you have come up the the answer that you wanted. Feel free to PM me if you have any aviation questions in the future.

Range

I'm probably way out of date on this, but when I flew small planes about thirty years ago, we were lucky if we could get the airport from twenty-five miles, let alone five hundred. Shoot, half the time five miles was a safe bet.

Then again, I was a sometimes pilot, and only flew out of three cow pattie airports. The smallest airport not only didn't have a control tower, you were lucky if anyone was on the radio at all. Assuming the radio was even working.