Definition
FAA Order 8260.3, titled United States Standard for Terminal Instrument Procedures (TERPS), is the FAA directive that prescribes the criteria for designing, evaluating, and maintaining instrument flight procedures in U.S. airspace, including departures, arrivals, approaches, and missed approaches. It establishes obstacle clearance requirements, protected airspace dimensions, descent gradients, and other design standards that procedure designers must follow.
Plain English
It is the FAA's official rulebook for how instrument flight procedures are built. Every published instrument approach, departure, and arrival in the United States is designed according to the rules in this document.
Context Anchor
Seen in instrument procedure design discussions. Pilots usually do not use FAA Order 8260.3 directly in flight, but they use charts and procedures that were built from its criteria.
Derivation
An FAA Order is a formal, numbered directive issued by the FAA to direct how something is to be done within the national airspace system. The number 8260.3 is simply its catalog identifier. The shorthand 'TERPS' (Terminal Instrument Procedures) is the name most pilots know it by.
Why Pilots Care
Procedures built to these standards provide the safety margins pilots depend on during instrument flight.
Analogy
FAA Order 8260.3 is like a building code for instrument procedures. A pilot may not read the code every day, but the finished structure—the published procedure—was built from it.
Intuition Check
Do not read Order here as a pilot’s spoken command or a purchase request. In this context, an FAA Order is an official FAA standards document.
Example Sentence 1
The minimum descent altitude on this approach was set using the obstacle clearance criteria in FAA Order 8260.3.
Example Sentence 2
Designers must follow FAA Order 8260.3 to ensure every segment of an instrument procedure meets minimum safety requirements.