Evaluation of Remote Altimeter Setting Penalty at Four North Georgia Airports

Abstract

Although an airport may have an instrument approach procedure, the procedures' ceiling minimums may be artificially increased as a result of a lack of a local altimeter setting. If the pilot is not allowed to land at the intended airport because of the required use of a remote altimeter setting, the community is potentially denied economic benefit because of flight disruption. Altimeter settings based on automated weather observation systems at four northern Georgia airports recorded during a 6-month period in early 1995 are analyzed. Each airport was assigned a hypothetical remote altimeter setting source (one of the three other airports). A comparison was made between the altimeter settings at each destination airport and the hypothetical remote altimeter setting source airport for differences in altimeter settings. These altimeter setting differences were then compared with the associated ceiling penalty a pilot would be given when executing an instrument approach at an airport using a remote altimeter source. For the extreme differences found in the data, it was found that the existing remote altimeter setting source penalty protected an aircraft from possibly descending too low when using a remote altimeter setting source.