Hillboro Patterns

Today was a ground training day. 2.5hrs of ground training, to be exact. Most of the lesson covered basic helicopter controls, basic flight principles, aviation communications, and Hillsboro Airport pattern layouts, among other things.

There is a rather old photo copy of these patterns hanging in the pilot lounge, so I decided that I needed to update it a bit. Now publicly available via Google Maps, by the way.

A little explanation:

• blue shaded area is 'A' or 'Alpha Pattern'; basically a practice area to fly in,
• green shaded area is 'B' or 'Bravo Pattern',
• purple shaded area is 'C' or 'Charlie Pattern',
  
• red shaded areas are noise sensitive areas where you need to be very conscious of your altitude. Better to just avoid them all toether.
• the yellow line is runway 30 (heading NW) or 12 (heading SE)
• the orange line is runway 20 (heading SW) or 02 (heading NE)
• green lines are hovering taxiway areas
• the 'i' is the air traffic control tower

An interesting fact I learned today is the runway naming convention. Append a '0' to the end of the runway number and you have the compass direction. So, runway 30 is pointing at 300º. Pretty convenient when you need to know how to line up for landing.




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