Visual flight rules

And all the notifications were made to ATC.

They were told specifically, "Notify us if there are any rescue helicopters in the way." They didn't say, "If there are any landing Ryanair [laughs] 737s in the way." The odd thing about it is that the controller read the notification, and the controller's interpretation was that the drones needed to be kept clear of only helicopters and VFR traffic, but not IFR traffic.

Now, every single airliner is on an IFR flight plan.

That, to me, [laughs] seems like a rather big oversight on their part.

I mean, that's basically less than a wingspan away, so good that the drone operated spotted the landing aircraft and got out of the way.

Kinda bad that the controllers [laughs] didn't realize that the instructions they got didn't make a lot of sense.

You know, they got instructions that said, "Hey, let us know about helicopters and VFR traffic." Their instructions didn't say, "Hey, let us know about IFR traffic." [laughs] I think a controller should have thought, "Wait a minute," you know? "Isn't a landing airliner just as important to, uh, you know, missing a drone as somebody who's flying VFR?"

What I don't th- remember reading in the story, Max, and I might have missed it, but you might have found, seen it, was did the Ryanair aircraft ever see the drone?

[upbeat music] Welcome to Backcountry Aviation Radio.

I'm your host, JB, focusing on VFR off-airport operations with big tires and short runways.

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He spent years in the Alberta oil fields before he ever put a torch to an airframe.

Use a different runway if the gradient requirements differ.

Depart VFR and then pick up your IFR clearance once you're clear of the terrain, or wait until conditions improve your aircraft performance enough to meet the requirement.

None of those options are fun to execute when you're ready to go home.

All of them are better than the alternative.

When performing night flights, the airplane should be equipped according to the FARs.

We need to have all-day VFR equipment.

And we go over this in our VFR airworthiness requirements lesson in detail.

So we're not going to go over it in detail here.

I'm just going to put these things here up on the screen.

But if you want to go, if you need to study this stuff, I should say, in detail, go to our airworthiness lessons, whether that's VFR airworthiness or our IFR airworthiness lessons.

Okay.

But we need all-day VFR equipment.

Red flag.

The captain testified that they had 5,800 pounds of fuel remaining at that point, and he believed that they would be on the ramp at St. Martin with 4,400 of that remaining if they did an ADF approach, or 5,000 pounds left if they did a straight-in VFR.

They had 57 minutes of fuel left.

Which is not much.

And obviously, if it was during bad weather, well, in the UK, you couldn't fly TFR in bad weather, except in the Scotland restricted area and very specific.

The difference in flying in the U.S., you can only fly low level like this at high speed on specified either VR routes, visual flight rules routes or IR routes, so instrument.

The difference on the VR routes, you could only fly if the weather was good.

So you had to have at least five mile visibility and I think a thousand foot ceiling or something like that.

On the IR route, you could fly in daytime in the clouds.