I know Don Brown. He is a good 'ol country boy, and an entertaining writer, but he is not a pilot. His aviation world is circumscribed by the AIM and Air Traffic Control Handbook, with no latitude (no pun intended) allowed. His Avweb column about filing IFR is almost perfect, but there are airplane-owning controllers around the country who will tell you that host computers throughout the system recognize lat-longs, while a radial-distance from a VORTAC several hundred miles away might get bounced because the VORTAC is not in the host computer. Keep filing lat-longs where appropriate even if you never get up to FL390.

Bob Gardner