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Quick, where is the nearest airport?

Do you know how easy it is to find your way to the nearest airport? Even if you don't master all the finer points of our Garmin 430W radios, it is incredibly easy to find the nearest airport, even in an emergency. Just grab the big knob on the right and rotate it all the way to the right. That's all it takes. You will then see a list of airports, starting with the closest and proceeding further out from your current location. Now if you are comfortable with poking at that radio some more, you can select a specific airport find out more information about it and set up an GPS course to that airport. But you don't need to do that to benefit from the "Nearest Airport" display. Just look at it. It tells you all you really need to know. It tells you, for each airport listed, its distance and the heading you need to fly to go straight toward it. All you have to do it point your plane in the direction shown and watch the distance count down to zero. Then you are there.

So don't let unfamiliarity with the Garmin radio prevent you from accessing this potentially life-saving information. The next time you are out flying, test it out and see how easy it is. Don't wait until an emergency to exercise this simple function.

Now, in looking back on how this was described, I asked myself how this might go wrong. And I did come up with a couple of gotchas. One is that you might have left the radio in the middle of a mode where the big knob on the right does not change pages as described. In that case you can back out of whatever it was you were doing that put the radio in that mode, but there is an easier way - a way that is much better suited to possible panic situations. That way is: Push and hold the CLR button. This is another life-saver worth remembering and trying out. No matter what mode you got yourself into, holding the CLR button for one second will always get you back to the default navigation page. This is worth knowing in case you find yourself hopelessly lost in some menu or selection function. Instead of diverting your attention to the radio and neglecting to fly the plane, just push and hold the CLR button for one second and the radio will be back in a familiar mode. Then if you want to find the nearest airport, for example, the big knob on the right will work as expected.

Another very unlikely gotcha is that when you rotate the big knob all the way to the right, you don't see the nearest airport, but rather you see the nearest intersection, NDB, VOR , or some such thing. This is very unlikely because every time the GPS is powered up, it resets the "Nearest" page to show "Nearest Airport". But if you happened to have gone to the "Nearest" page and then turned the small knob, you could have changed that selection to "Nearest something else" instead of "Nearest Airport". For this to be a problem you would have had to make this change earlier on the same flight. As I said, every time the Garmin is turned off, it resets that selection to "Nearest Airport".

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Last of the MANG Shirts and Window Decals

The last remaining 6 MANG shirts are:

Navy Blue L

Navy Blue 2XL

Dark Green XXL

Yellow XXL

Yellow 3XL

Red 3XL

There are also 8 MANG window decals left. They are available for $20 for a shirt and $9 for a window decal, and they will be at the June 11th plane wash.

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