IFR Lesson #3
There was no simulator work today. Instead, we spent the entire lesson in the classroom talking about navigation aids, specially VORs and NDBs. My logbook shows 11.6 hours of hood-based instrument time, thanks mostly to my private licence and a night rating. Whenever possible I try to use VORs and NDBs for navigation so their use isn’t foreign to me. So I figured I’d be in good shape.
However, up until this point when flying I have either tuned the aid to find out what radial (or track I’m on) or maintained the current heading until I ‘ran into’ a specific radial. This was the first time that I had been forced to think about how to properly intercept a specific radial and what the TO/FROM flag would be showing. Or in the case of the NDB, how to intercept a specific track on both fixed and non-fixed card ADFs.
We went over the limitations of the various nav aids and the proper way tune, identify and test them. We then discussed how the VORs and NDBs function and, using a giant, magnetic VOR and NDB receiver, went through how the various nav aids would react based on the aircraft’s relative position. I think this is probably the most misunderstood part of navigation and there is a lot of information on the Internet to help. The best resource I’ve come across, thanks to my instructor Jason, is Tim’s Air Navigation Simulator. The Java-applet based simulator allows you to select the nav aid type, set them as desired and then move an aircraft around, either by dragging it with the mouse or by ‘flying’ it. Everything is done from a top-down view and overall it’s a great tool for getting your head around nav aids.
