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Old 19th February 2012 | 10:58
  #34 (permalink)  
24Carrot
 
Joined: Jan 2008
Posts: 517
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From: London UK
A footnote on calculating this in the cockpit:

Backpacker wrote:
So true heading is 012 degrees, while true track is 000 degrees. Ground speed is 100 * cos(12) = 97.81 knots.
The quick-and-dirty mental approximation for this, ( 1-cos(angle) ), is:
Percentage Speed reduction = (angle / 8) squared.

So (12/8) x (12/8) = 2.25%

For small numbers the percentage speed reduction is roughly the same as the percentage time increase, so the extra time is:
120 minutes x 2.25% = 2.7 minutes,
versus the 2.6 minutes in Backpacker's exact calculation.

In practice the effect is small, so the calculations can be rounded up to make the maths easier, to get a "worst case" arrival delay which is still typically small.
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