PilotEdge Forums

I fly out of KCNO and normally request a squawk code for flight following from Chino Ground. They will normally come back on the radio and say Cessna 502 Tango Mike remain clear of the class charile (ontario) airspace until two way communication has been established, squawk will be assigned by chino tower. Once the run-up is complete and I contact the tower to let them know I'm holding short 26 right, they will at that point give me the code and freq to contact So Cal. I've found that Chino is different than other such as Camarillo who will tell you to contact Mugu Approach for FF, Whiteman who passes you to Burbank Tower or Fox who tells you to contact Joshua Approach. Just my two cents for whatever it's worth.

As you allude to in the real world there are a lot of local variance on how flight following is obtained. At my old local airport you had to call center to get flight following.

It would take us a lot of work to figure out and emulate the local policy for 40 airports, we also wouldn't gain anything other then frustrating pilots who don't fly in SOCAL. As a result PilotEdge has gone with a uniform policy of ground can give you a squawk code for flight following at any airport. We will also accept pilots who take off and call the TRACON airborne for flight following. Both methods are 100% ok here.

The determining factor in all of that is whether the tower has a radar display. If it does, the tower has the capability to enter aircraft IDs into the TRACON's computer system and have it return a squawk code to assign. If the tower has no radar display, the tower will simply inform aircraft whom to contact after departure.

That said, a majority of towers in the U.S. do in fact have radar displays, which is why the FAA encourages pilots to request flight following on the ground. There is actually only one FAA tower that does not have a radar display -- Lafayette, IN. The rest of the non-radar towers are operated by contractors, and even those facilities are few and far between. CMA and WJF are included on that short list.

HRutila wrote:The determining factor in all of that is whether the tower has a radar display. If it does, the tower has the capability to enter aircraft IDs into the TRACON's computer system and have it return a squawk code to assign. If the tower has no radar display, the tower will simply inform aircraft whom to contact after departure.

That said, a majority of towers in the U.S. do in fact have radar displays, which is why the FAA encourages pilots to request flight following on the ground. There is actually only one FAA tower that does not have a radar display -- Lafayette, IN. The rest of the non-radar towers are operated by contractors, and even those facilities are few and far between. CMA and WJF are included on that short list.

Wow that is interesting. In the South East I have yet to find a class D that will give me Flight Following on the ground. They will only do IRF clearances and tell you for Flight Following you need to contact approach once in the air.

did a controller tell you that about needing a radar? I've never heard that but maybe it's the case.

The codes comes from the FDIO computer (the clunky POS I use to enter flight plans manually etc) - and that's how we get you FF in the NAS. If you're just getting traffic adz through our airspace then yes, well enter s local VFR code into the radar software. No idea how it works in SoCal. Probably has to go through the FDIO and into the NAS because there's so much airspace.

One of the workshops covered this in detail. In real life, you can give it a try at a given airport, if they say they can't do it, then you'll know for next time, but there's really no way to know in advance. At the very least, they'll give you a departure frequency if you're not already aware.