Arrival can be very busy for an IFR pilot. You are flying into busy airspace with controllers speaking a mile a minute and directing 10s of aircraft a second so you are guaranteed to get an arrival procedure - for White Plains this is the 2nd time I've had the NOBBI 5 arrival.
It was slightly tricky this time... I was asked to go direct PETER intersection for the NOBBI 5 approach.
This would typically be straight forward on the GPS - you'd select select approach, load NOBBI 5 approach and when you activate it you'd select from the available transitions. The slight problem is that there was no PETER transition - just the one before it - DNY. You can manually (and painfully) enter the waypoints in-between PETER right up till the end as per the above chart and below written instructions, or...
...you can load NOBBI 5 with the DNY transition, select PETER from the GPS flight plan and hit direct to to commence the approach from PETER as instructed.
Also useful to know is that once in a while, the controller will say "proceed on course to" and give you something that's on the approach - so you'd select it from the flight plan and hit direct to, which will bypass the intermediate waypoints, point your plane to the selected way point and continue to the other waypoints.
Note that between CYPER and TRESA the altitude indicated is 6000 ft - I confirmed with the controller if I should descend to 6000 when I got to CYPER to which the controller said "Negative, stay at 9000 ft." So this requires clarification from an instructor - if you shouldn't go to the step down altitudes or if that's only for comm failure.
The rest of the flight was uneventful - I was asked to descend to 6000, then 4000, then 2000 while getting vectors along the way to final (runway 16) before being passed on to KHPN tower for the landing #2 following a Falcon.
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