>>Many places require you to perform an ADF approach,
>>maybe that's the reason.
That's not the point. The point is that airfields that cannot afford a minimum of a VOR (preferably an ILS) should be off-limits to commercial traffic. This would free up two slots in the center pedestal of every commercial aircraft in the world, and make things much safer. ADF approach for an A380? You must be joking.
We started off with ADFs, in the '30s (?). Then we had VORs, ILSs, INS and GPS. You would have thought that the first on the list could be deleted by now. And an ever more crowded and complicated cockpit inevitably means ever more scope for errors. GIGO works on flightdecks, every bit as much as it does for computers. Witness the French A320 three-degree crash.
Its like comms boxes. Some numbskull decided to add yet another digit to the box, making frequencies more and more unintelligible (who was this g!t?). When any competent ergonomicist would notice that the number of frequencies (if we used all channel numbers) only required 4 digits, not 6. So frequency hand-overs are being garbled daily on the airwaves, with the attendent dangers of miss-communication, all because aviation has lost an understanding of KISS.
Not sure what someone meant by not needing an ADF for a non-precision. Dual GPS approaches are not yet authorised, so an ADF will need to be tuned and idented in such cases.
Last edited by silverstrata; 3rd Oct 2011 at 14:01.