Radio Communications in Controlled Class D Airspace

[Matthew N]

Radio Communications in Class D Airspace

What to Expect

Could also be titled, 'Everything you've ever wanted to know about VFR radio communications in Class D. controlled airspace, but were too afraid to ask.'

Or: 'Save $1000 on Flight Training'

A humorous and educational experience.


Okay, so you want to learn how to talk to a Control Tower. It's actually not as hard as it may seem at first. I speak from recent experience, when I had to master flying in and out of Moorabbin Airport, in Melbourne. As a student pilot, I was always accustomed to the pilot controlled CTAF broadcasts, having done most of my training at Bacchus Marsh. When I went to Moorabbin to do more training there, I had to find out quickly how to operate in Class D, and at first I thought it would be too much to master quickly. But with lots and lots and lots of homework, lots of instruction and a number of hours of training flights, within a week I was doing just fine.

So I suppose another subtitle for this article would be 'Getting from Bacchus Marsh to Moorabbin, intellectually.'

Usually when you're learning Class D radio procedures, your instructor will give you an abbreviated little printout a couple of pages long with a list of examples of typical calls made in Moorabbin, but not a lot of 'WHY'. These documents are good for an instant concept of it, but I have decided to write this article for anyone who wants to know the reasons behind all the different points, because strangely, I couldn't find any step-by-step type of educational material like this already in existence to learn from. So I made a lot of mistakes!

Wanna know what they were? Read on.

So this document is a resume for myself and anyone else who wants to read it, of all the things I learnt from instructors, publications, and experienced in practice while earning my competencies of flying in Class D.

I will say that reading this and mastering the techniques given here will enable you to totally understand the transition from pilot controlled to tower controlled airspace, and could easily save you around $1000 of dual flight time, because you will not need to be trained on it by your instructor either on the ground, or on the fly. And, you won't make all my mistakes! It can also save hours of internet searches and reading random pages from this and that, because as far as I have so far found, it's all here. I sure wish I had read a write-up like this before I trained last month, I would have saved at least a grand.

Actually it's amazing that I am still alive today to write this, considering what I didn't know when I started training there. So read and learn!

CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE PDF...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...20AIRSPACE.pdf

IT COULD BE WORTH IT!