"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:gTE5f.497537$xm3.148457@attbi_s21...
After all the talk about not using "leading zeros" when making radio calls
referring to runways, I tried my darndest to omit those offending zeros
today.

To my surprise and dismay, my mouth has apparently developed an
"autopilot" mode that seemed to prohibit even the simplest changes to my
rote radio procedures. It literally took me FOUR TRIES to be able to
refer to our Runway 7 as "Runway SEVEN" -- not "Runway ZERO SEVEN."



Don't let some dyslexic bureaucrat's influence on the misguided youth in
this ng destroy all your years of *proper* usage. :-)

Avoiding the leading zero on a direction-based entity is unnatural and only
leads to confusion. FAA's own NACO chart-selection web site INCLUDES the
leading zero in the INDEX, when selecting your IAP plate, but then the
actual plate has the runway WITHOUT the leading zero.

When our dyslexic bureaucrat read the FAA's description: "Runways are
normally numbered in relation to their magnetic direction rounded off to the
nearest 10 degrees", he just assumed that 10 divided by 10 is "1"; seventy
divided by 10 was "7" (quite correctly, I suppose). So that's what he went
out and painted.

For some of the rest of us, "magnetic direction" implied, quite
understandably "magnetic direction as in:
magnetic-direction-as-used-for-navigation".

Zero-seven-zero divided by ten is still zero-seven, whether the zero is
painted there or not.