ILS and Subaru adulations

A $3.5 million tangle of electronic circuits and antennae isn’t the first thing that springs to mind when you hear “infrastructure.” But the grandiosely named Tinian International Airport, known as “west field” to local pilots, is putting three-point five mil to good use as it looks forward to the installation of an Instrument Landing System.

Whew—finally we get some good news on the economic front. Instead of being looted via shady sole source contracts, expensive junkets, and the usual array of kleptocratic crimes, some money is actually being invested in necessary infrastructure.

So just what is an Instrument Landing System? ILS is conceptually an electronic beam that aircraft can follow down to the runway when they come in to land. ILS is known as a “precision approach” since it gives aircraft vertical navigational guidance as well as horizontal navigational guidance. (A non-precision approach lacks the vertical guidance).

In other words, if you’re a pilot flying to an airport using an ILS approach, and if your airplane has an ILS receiver, and if you know what you’re doing, your instruments will tell you if you need to go up or down, in addition to telling you if you need to go right or left, in order to get to the centerline of the runway, whereupon you can make a nice landing, impress all the chicks, and enjoy the adulation of all witnesses.

Ain’t that grand? Chicks dig pilots.

So we all could use some dashing ILS lingo, eh? We’ll start here: The ILS vertical guidance is usually a three degree angle from the horizontal, and this is known as the “glideslope.”

Horizontal guidance, by the way, is known as “course.”

ILS is the industry-standard approach for airliners, since ILS is such a safe and well-established system. Saipan has an ILS. Guam does, too.

Rota and Tinian, by contrast, do not; frankly, they currently have pretty lousy non-precision approaches based on pretty much obsolete technology.

And here we introduce aviation’s omnipresent factor: weather. An ILS approach will give a pilot better accommodations in bad weather than a non-precision approach. It’s quite often the case in the aviation world that if weather is a factor, whether or not an airport has an ILS makes the difference between being able to land there and not land there.

That’s mighty important, and it gets more important if you’re flying vast distances over water, to a destination that offers few alternative landing choices. Like, uh…Asia to Tinian. An ILS on Tinian makes Tinian a far more usable airport for airlines.

But you don’t need lousy weather to make an ILS useful. Even a clear night is dark, especially on the islands, and guidance from an ILS is a great safety measure. “We’ll fly a visual approach backed up by the ILS” is a phrase commonly spoken in cockpits, even in daytime.

If Tinian wants to muscle in the big iron, an ILS will make it a more attractive proposition. It’s a great idea. Count me as a supporter of the Tinian ILS project.

My only question is whether or not the big, powerful radio towers at Tinian’s north side will goober up the ILS signal somehow, but I’m sure the experts will puzzle that one out.

And now you, too, are an ILS expert, or at least you can sound like one. Sprinkle your conversations with random references to three-degree glideslopes. Say “down and three green” whenever you approach your driveway in your used Subaru. Everyone will be impressed.

Then all you need is a big wristwatch and a set of aviator shades…and I’m thinking that chicks will dig you, too.

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“It is better to break ground and fly into the wind than to break wind and fly into the ground.”
—Old pilot saying