Hi Roy,
I seem to recall the CNX-80 Tutorial talks about it being used for
weather avoidance during IFR enroute flight. I guess their thought is
that you can use it to request a diversion around weather, eg: a 5-mile
diversion to the left. Then you can program it into the CNX-80 and stay
parallel to your track.

As you know, I don't have a whole lot of IFR experience - I had thought
that you typically tell ATC about your diversions for weather in degrees
and time (5 degrees left for about 5 min), so it very well may be one of
those "sex-sells" types of features. But I thought I'd share with you
what I read on the tutorial...



Roy Smith wrote in
:

Yesterday I played with the parallel track function in the CNX-80 for
the first time. I was introducing the CNX-80 to a student and I had
planned a VFR flight via airways. My student (rightfully) questioned
the wisdom of an over-water segment, so we decided to fly that segment
on a 5-mile offset parallel track (it got us over land and was a good
excuse to explore a software function I'd never used before).

But, here's my question. Why is it in the box to begin with? Other
than the gee-wiz marketing value, is there any real practical reason
for it existing?

VFR, we didn't need it (it was easy enough to follow the coastline
visually). IFR, it would have put us outside the airway boundary, so
it's probably not very useful there either. Is "fly parallel to V157
offset 2 miles to the left" something that I might ever expect to get
in an IFR clearance if I file /G ?