An Aviation Safety Staff Report

We’ve discussed the differences and conflicts between various types of approaches before but, if there is any procedure that meets the “good news/bad news” test, it’s the generic non-precision approach, or NPA. On one hand, we like them because they cut us some slack if we’re feeling particularly mellow, the visibility isn’t too low and the ceilings are still comfortably high. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, well, an NPA is less crisp than its big brother, the ILS. There are many reasons for this—some of which we’ll explore—but for now understand that the bad news isn’t restricted to the lack of an electronic…