dublinpilot

Quite right, BRNAV capability is mandatory only on BRNAV routes at FL095 and above and this is IFR flight. In the GA context, an IFR GPS is the only meaningful way to meet this requirement.

I am not aware of any nav equipment requirement for day VFR flight. The UK has none. One can look in each country's AIP; I vaguely recall Germany requires the carriage of an ADF (of all things) for night VFR, and France might have something like a VOR receiver given that they permit VMC on top.

A and C

For en-route nav, the case for an TSO'd GPS is a lot thinner than the vendors who charge 5x more money for them would like you to think. The biggest benefit by far comes from a dedicated rooftop aerial. A non-IFR panel mount like a KMD150 (essentially a panel mounted Skymap 3) will be every bit as reliable as a KLN94, GNS430, GNS530. RAIM is not an issue for en-route nav, in reality. And the great benefit of a non-IFR panel mount is that you can load a flight plan into it from a laptop; this feature is not available in any GA IFR unit.

FlyingForFun

As a hardware/software developer I too prefer reading printouts. Paper charts are nicer for large-scale VFR flight planning, because one often needs to work out a bizzarely detailed route to stay outside CAS - only to get a nice DCT through it all on the actual flight.

But nobody is suggesting doing away with paper charts. With a decent flight planning program with the real VFR raster charts (look up Jepp Flitestar and their Raster Chart add-on) you can get the same thing but it's still quite awkward and you need a printer handy.

Really, today, the anti-GPS case ranks alongside leather helmets, goggles, the signals square, keeping the tail wheel in a bucket to stop mice crawling up it and eating the seats, the slide rule, the man in the bar who boasts how he flew some fabric covered biplane all the way to Egypt without ever going above 600ft and without a radio. Nothing wrong with any of these things, so long as one sees them in their correct perspective :O

IO540

Thats that is not true!

I still find leather helmets are the best thing for holding on DCs when aeroing :)

Bet he buys fewer drinks than the person with a fully kitted out moving map spamcan.

I don't see loading data into a panel mounted GPS an issue after all I can get a 5 hour flight plan into the box before the oil walms up enough to taxi.

Thats in the UK , At LGSA in the summer the oil is walm enough to taxi befor I have left the hotel !

The idea behind loading a flight plan from say Navbox or Flitestar directly into the GPS is that it avoids human error.

This is the big "missing link" for IFR flight. You HAVE to use a GPS for airways flight, you more or less have to use serious flight planning software to work out the route, the route can comprise of 50 waypoints, yet there is no way to transfer them from the laptop to the GPS.

The big problem with programming the route in the aircraft is you are much more likely to make a mistake. I only have a 196, but programming it before I leave home with Navbox makes it much more usable than my old 150XL. It only takes a few seconds to transfer and I get the plog and the frequency’s on the printer, which match the route, at the same time.

Rod1

I won't say that I don't make mistakes but 50 waypoints ! ! what on earth are you doing ? I can do northern Spain from the UK with not more than about 15 waypoints.

The gross error check at the end of the input is the distance from the plog to the GPS normaly the differance is one or two miles.

Remember that the SID,s & STAR,s are in the box so that part of the set up is easy the STAR on the taxi out and the SID when you get the arrival clearance.

Depends on whether your GPS can accept airway references directly. Very few can. If not, lots and lots of waypoints to go in, lots of knob twiddling.

In real world terms there is about the same amount of work in putting a route plan into a GA GPS as there is in putting a route of the same time duration into an airliner FMC.

The FMC will of course put in all the waypoints on an airway a with just the input of the start fix, airway number and end fix but most of this information is surplus to requiements in practical terms.

The time that most likely to need a "surplus" waypoint is if ATC wants an ETA for that point, the nearest function on most GA GPS units is likely to find that point and get it into the flight plan as least as quickly as it can be done from the fix page of an FMC. As to loading data in lat/long format there is nothing to choose between a GPS & an FMC in terms of time.

There are some navigation functions on the FMC that the GPS lacks but add a heading input from the HSI and a Fuel/Air data computor and you get 98% of the functions of an FMC for 5% of the price.

Yes, one could load a (straight) airway just by putting in the two fixes and a DCT between them; the advantage of having the intermediate points loaded is that ATC are likely to give you a DCT to one of them, and it is very quick to just scroll down to it on the list and press DCT.

Small details, I agree.

You also get keyboard data entry on a FMC :O

With all the talk of red hot technology perhaps we should take a look at how things were done it the past, may be BEagle could set up a trip for us to the old airliner living museum that is on his door step !.

GPS Is here and is definitely the future

There are quite a few "Luddites" who cannot see this and who don't want to see this and the CAA gives them plenty of good reasons to stay in the dark ages however....

If you have a paper plan worked out and you back it up with GPS then you have the best of both worlds. FAA advise that a technically advanced aircraft is one which has an autopilot and gps and both of these are required equipment for flight.:cool:

In respect of at least the Garmin 430/530, this is absolute tosh.
The spread of scaremongering misinformation about GPS continues.

Lots of intolerance and 'only my way works' from people on both sides of the argument.

Beagle

The highly desirable utopia you describe will never happen, not in Europe anyway.

As I've suggested, you can get close enough though.

Navbox and Flitestar will both load up a non-IFR GPS. Navbox requires the use of printed charts. Flitestar can have the Jepp VFR/GPS charts in it.

IMV, for VFR or IFR flight at nonpressurised levels, one needs a lot more than just a list of TAFs and METARs along the planned route and the F215. One looks at other sources e.g. SigWX, various bits of GFS. So this looks very difficult to do automatically, to everyone's liking.

Again for VFR flight, Notams are a must and in principle one could set up an interface into the AIS database and stuff the planned route into the Narrow Route Briefing. I believe that Navbox has done a tie-up with Avbrief which is supposed to do just this, but last time I tried it (some months ago) I could not get it to work. However, entering the route into the NRB form is trivial enough.

You don't need to fly daily to remain familiar with a modern GPS, for basic en route operations. And terminal operations are not go get a lot of exercise in the UK right now...

A&C

I think airliners never had much of a problem (well other than going into the odd bit of the Andes because their dead reckoning went wrong) because they have been under radar control for many years, they don't have to avoid CAS, icing is rarely a problem (equipment plus mach heating), and they have 2 pilots. I have better nav gear than Concorde had when it retired (I went into the cockpit after landing). A lot of the technology drive for GA appears to be flash marketing (big LCDs especially) but it should make single pilot IFR safer, through a reduction in cockpit workload.

Erm ... from which part of my post did you discern any intolerance or any 'only my way works'? I was not expressing those views and, as it happens, most definitely don't hold them. I would support any navigation method that works reliably.
BEagle made a strong statement against using the more complex GPS's unless you fly daily. That is about as nonsensical and inaccurate as claiming you need to fly daily if you are going to rely on a map, compass and stopwatch!

Chriscook, my statement was in support of yours.

Hey FFF, is that why you changed jobs? :E

Skyhawk-N

Beagle

It is worth taking a look at some of the more recently developed aviation software for GPSs before reaching a conclusion.

PocketFMS is a good example.

The maps cover the whole of Europe and are as detailed as the “official” charts. Monthly updates are freely available. There is a growing user group that work together to keep the non critical data up to date. The software can be run on a PC with full facilities and the flight plans “uploaded” to your GPS. METAR and TAFS can be downloaded for all airports for a given FIR not just en route airports. The frequency information for every airport is shown as well as that for all navigation beacons, all controlled airspace is shown including UK class A, as are all danger areas depicted. VFR approach profiles are available for all airports as well as VFR circuit diagrams and AIP extract. Agreed NOTAMS are not yet shown. Agreed, I am not suggesting this is an “IFR”compliant setup.

Proponents of restricting the use of GPS should take a look at this type of software and of the more recent offerings from Garmin and others before reaching a conclusion. It is surprising how much the software and hardware has progressed.

The reality is all the time the system is working there is really no need to look at a chart or a flight guide again because you have all the information on the display in front of you. I accept the caveat "all the time it is working" and thats why the chart and flight guide will remain firmly by my side but as I posted previoulsy not one GPS has yet let me down and with running twin GPSs there is a bit of redundancy as well.:ok:

The real question is how far you rely on “modern” technology and how far you allow the “old” skills to deteriorate. Sailors use to be able to use a sextant, but not many still can, sailors use to be able to “plot” a course using the manual navigation skills we use in the air, and most making serious passages still can, but many are totally reliant on GPS. The fact is as GPS has been perceived as becoming more and more reliable, and sets cheaper, so more than one can be carried, the more sailors have been prepared to rely on the GPS never letting them down. In reality pilots maybe have it easier because were the GPS to fail (at least in the UK at any rate) they will get a steer from D and D if the “old” skills have become so rusty they do not work!

The question this poses is whether we continue to be correct placing all the emphasis on teaching the “old” skills as part of our PPL training whilst almost totalling ignoring the use of GPSs? Might we at some point become totally reliant on GPSs as our primary means of navigation with most pilots taught these skills during their training with little emphasis on traditional skills? After all in most SEPs we trust our lives to at best double redundancy (two mags, two fuel pumps) and at worst to single redundancy (one engine). I would be interested to know the statistics for engine failures a year compared with twin GPS failures a year - I reckon I know which has the better odds.

An anecdote which for me illustrates well the advantages of GPS. I remember getting a bit too close to some very bad weather in an area with which I was not very familiar and with none of the en route diversions I had planned looking very attractive. There was a somewhat pressing need to go in a completely different direction which as it happened was between charts. The nearest function was able to pull up and at a glance eliminate all the airports in an unsuitable direction, plot a steer, show any danger areas that required avoiding, provide all the frequency information needed, pull up the terrain and ensure there was sufficient fuel to beat a hasty retreat. That’s all information that traditional skills should also be able to provide us with but the instancy with which it is available is a heck of a way of reducing cockpit stress and freeing up time to get on with the more important tasks of flying the old girl!