Back to the Bricks | Part 1, Modernization

Homeward Bound

During the fall of 2025, I began a dialog with Jess, a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan-Flint, my alma mater set at the intersection of the Flint River and the red brick thoroughfare of Saginaw Street. She extended an invitation to visit campus and speak with students about careers in chemistry. It would mark my first return visit since 2015 when I participated in a curriculum advisory committee ("Nature's Power Washer"). Later that fall, I met with faculty again when I returned with Kristy to experience our first University of Michigan football game in The Big House ("Somewhere Over the Rainbow"). For my talk with students, Jess and I agreed on the second week of April and shelved our discussion until 2026.

Though grudgingly, winter finally deferred to spring and I expected good enough weather to fly myself to Flint for the visit. However, it was clear by early 2026 that I would not make that flight to Michigan in the same manner as over the last twenty years and that there were two barriers, surmountable ones, standing in the way.

The Future Is Bright and It Comes with a Touch Screen

I trained for my instrument rating in Warrior 481 behind a trusty Garmin GNS 430W navigator, a capable piece of equipment that I came to understand so well that I taught my instrument examiner something new about its operation during my test. The 430 displays its 1990s roots overtly with a minimally colored moving map display featuring Nintendo Game Boy quality graphics. Still, for a 1970s airplane, installation of the 430W was a massive modernization. At the time I installed it, my friend Garrett flew freight for an outfit based at Oakland County International Airport. “I would give anything for the capability of a 430,” he exclaimed at the time, then regaled me with tales of flying dodgy NDB approaches into other parts of the world.

However, as time went by, the noble 430W accumulated disadvantages versus current technology. Those included diminishing trade-in value, increasing scarcity of components for repairs, and simply being more cumbersome to use than modern navigators. Specifically, 430W users risk repetitive stress injuries from knob twisting during IFR reroutes. For 2026, I decided to futureproof my IFR flying while taking advantage of the 430W's residual monetary value and traded it in for a Garmin GTN 650 Xi. Like the 430W, the 650 integrates radio communications, a VHF navigation receiver, and a moving map GPS into a single box, but does all of this behind a colorful high resolution display doubling as a touch screen interface.

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
15 Mar 2026	N21481	SDC (Sodus, NY) - GVQ (Batavia, NY)	0.6	3116.0

I ferried Warrior 481 to the Genesee County Airport (GVQ) on March 15, hitching a ride home with Gilead in Archer Eight Five X-Ray. Unexpected icing between Genesee County and Rochester made the return flight memorable, but with a precautionary diversion to Rochester, all was well.

Thus, making the flight to Flint became a question of whether the avionics work would be completed by my April 8 departure date. Fortunately, the work was portentously completed on April 1 (ha ha!) and I retrieved the airplane on Saturday, April 4 with huge thanks to Kristy for ground support.

1970s Tech Comes to the Rescue

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
04 Apr 2026	N21481	GVQ (Batavia, NY) - SDC (Sodus, NY) - ROC (Rochester, NY) - SDC	2.0	3118.0

As a check of 650 functionality immediately after startup, I tuned the field AWOS (automated weather observation station) and heard a strong, clear broadcast of current weather conditions. Satisfied, I completed my departure preparations and launched skyward.

Spoiler alert: the GTN 650 Xi as installed and operated during the round trip to Flint, MI. Photo from April 11, 2026.

A problem quickly became apparent, however. Every effort to raise Rochester Approach for passage through their Charlie airspace failed. I resorted to "old reliable", the 1970s era King KX-170B radio still in the panel, to achieve two way communication with Rochester. When the new tech fails, it's good to know that stuff from the 70s literally keeps on truckin'.

On approach to Sodus, the 650 failed to pull in radio calls from pattern traffic a mere five miles away and conversely, none of them could hear my futile pleas for radio checks. It was the KX-170B to the rescue once more. I managed one successful radio check with the 650, but it was while chief instructor Mike was launching 300 feet away from where I taxied. Even receipt of the on-field AWOS broadcast was weak and scratchy. Something was definitely amiss with the 650.

Nevertheless, I took the Warrior aloft again that day and successfully tracked VORs, flew the ILS-22 at Rochester and two RNAV-28 approaches at Sodus, and executed a perfect hold in lieu of procedure turn (or HILPT) maneuver. The 650 drove HAL, my Garmin autopilot, beautifully. But all voice communications were forced to rely on 50 year old radio tech. That afternoon, I determined that the 650 worked flawlessly in all regards except that transmission and receipt of radio communications were both inexplicably weak. I even crawled behind the rear bulkhead and into Warrior 481's empennage to verify that the communications antenna was actually connected to something. It was.

Buyer's Remorse

I debated for years about making this upgrade and receiving the airplane with a brand new but nonfunctional radio created a deflating sense of buyer's remorse. This was especially true because I had just given up a reliable and fully functional navigator. After thinking on it, I decided that I would fly the trip to Flint with a single functional radio (the really old one), but I was not happy about it. Availability of a handheld radio to monitor a second frequency did little to quell the sour feeling in my stomach about the money I had just spent.

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
06 Apr 2026	N21481	SDC (Sodus, NY) -GVQ (Batavia, NY) - SDC	1.3	3119.3

Fortunately, a small weather window opened on the morning of Monday, April 6. It was a gusty, unsettled atmosphere to swim through, but perfectly manageable. Despite spending mid morning to early afternoon at the shop, I still managed to get in a full day's worth of work by rising early and staying late. It was a long day.

In Batavia, the troubleshooting process took roughly twenty minutes to deliver a solution. In short, the installers connected the 650 to the wrong pointy bits on the Warrior's fuselage, swapping the communications and navigational antennas. Clearly, the Warrior was content to track a VOR through the comm antenna, but was not at all happy about broadcasting and receiving radio communications through the nav antenna. "Amateur hour," muttered the installer as he worked to make it right. This lack of attention to detail did little to assuage my buyer's remorse, but the first barrier was now removed. I had a fully operational airplane at my disposal for the flight to Flint.

Loss of Preferred Routing

The second barrier to the trip also derived from a decision I made in 2025. In the wake of various health concerns ("Warrior 481 Gets a Useful Load Increase"), I chose to let my Third Class FAA medical lapse and fly on BasicMed instead. While this significantly reduced the paperwork overhead involved in maintaining medical certification, it came with a downside relevant to my planned trip. Though I have flown directly from New York to Michigan via Canada dozens of times over the past 20 years, BasicMed is not recognized outside of US borders. I am now shut out of Canadian airspace.

Going the long way around.

Forgoing the direct route to Flint through Canada meant a more circuitous trek south of Lake Erie by way of Cleveland and Detroit that added 100 miles to the journey. It was also a route that passed through two Bravo airspaces surrounding the aforementioned cities. Past experience suggested that Cleveland is relatively easygoing about their airspace. However, transit through the Detroit Bravo has been a mixed bag over the years and often meant being vectored either around the Bravo entirely or directly over Detroit Metro (KDTW) on a path orthogonal to arrivals and departures. It was not lost on me that passing through the western fringe of the airspace (see graphic above) would put me downrange from Detroit's southwest oriented departure corridor with four parallel runways functionally aimed at me like "Boeing cannons". I was not sure how controllers at either facility would react to my passage through their airspace.

Back in My Day

(Stay off my lawn!)

In the old days, using established airways provided some assurance of acceptable routes through busy airspace. But with the shutdown of numerous ground-based VOR navaids in the Great Lakes region that physically anchored those Victor airway routes, the area has become an airway desert.

IFR low altitude en route chart (L-30) from 20 September 2012.

For example, the above photo is a paper IFR low altitude en route chart (L-30) from 20 September 2012 that shows all the airways (black lines crisscrossing the chart) and VORs (the circled features where those airways converge) between Cleveland (pale blue circle at the lower left) and Dunkirk, NY (upper right corner). For reference, the pale green outline is Lake Erie.

Current IFR low altitude en route chart L-30.

Today, the infrastructure looks very different. Above is a screen capture of the current low altitude IFR en route chart for the same region. The disappearance of airways and the VORs that anchor them is breathtaking. It's not just in the United States, either. Historically, several Victor airways were anchored to the Aylmer VOR in southern Ontario (visible in the 2012 L-30 chart). This station was also removed from service sometime during the last decade. (2018, if memory serves.) While I understand why these changes were made, it is hard not to feel a sense of loss in comparing today's charts against those printed when I was still an instrument student. That was a lot of cheese and someone moved virtually all of it.

IFR low altitude en route chart L-28 from 20 September 2012.

Likewise, the above chart (L-28) from 20 September 2012 shows Detroit (the largest blue area on the right) between Toledo, OH (the blue circle near the bottom of the chart) and Flint, MI (the blue circle at the top of the chart).

Current IFR low altitude en route chart L-28.

In this case, the Detroit area demonstrates the same extensive decommissioning of VORs and airways and also reflects the increase in diameter of the Detroit Bravo implemented in 2014. Interestingly, if one pans eastward looking for remaining Victor airways, their density increases significantly in eastern New York and extends out to the coastal hubs of Boston, NYC, and Philadelphia. But from Rochester west toward Michigan, the Great Lakes region is now functionally a GPS-direct zone for navigation.

Slightly Better than a Dartboard

So...how to choose a route?

In the absence of airway routing through these Bravos, I chose a route based on charted GPS waypoints between Sodus and Flint: GEE (an honest to goodness operational VOR south of Rochester), EDMNN (on the lakeshore north of Cleveland and deep within that Bravo), JERRI (to manage the shape of the lake near Sandusky), and HUUTZ (to line up with Flint). This route would keep my feet dry and avoid restricted areas (R-5502A&B). But it would also carry me through the Cleveland and Detroit airspaces. 

Will controllers allow me to fly that route? Let's file it and see what develops. At least I can talk with them now using whiz-bang 2020s tech instead of relying solely on a King radio fabricated 50 years ago.