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Old 23rd Mar 2014, 22:17
  #7584 (permalink)  
737Jock
 
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For the purpose of this exercise, it is reminded that pilots, a long long time ago at the beginning of their careers, learnt to not just input bearings in an electronic device but also to calculate them by hand (bearings /speeds /distance), in such a way that I would expect any of you pilots to still be able to do the calculations in a second without paper and pencil, possibly in a split second. Without getting into complicated trig, recall that you subtracted various angles, the most common of which are 90°, 180°, 270° and 360°. In between, geometry remnants would kick some memories of angles such as 30°, 45° and their complements.
That would be a wrong assumption.

First of all we don't enter bearings into the FMC. We enter airways or waypoints, that are contained in a verified database, into the FMC. Bearings are barely ever used!

The biggest concern in everyday life regarding angles is that you don't bust your crosswind limitations, and on 99% of days thats not a concern either.

Doing complicated raw data VOR radial intercepts, or even holdings is not something that is done regularly (nor trained regularly) in modern aviation (bar maybe a few companies).

Last edited by 737Jock; 23rd Mar 2014 at 22:30.
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