Can GPS be *too* accurate? Do I need some XTE??

If you have never flown a VOR course, where in hell do you fly?

I am a certificated American pilot, and have been for six years. I
have never flown a VOR course and never expect to. I fly in New
Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. I have about 350 hours.

(Early on, I owned a Sporty's handheld with nav feature. I once tuned
it to the Pease VOR just to see how it worked, and never used the
feature again. After not very long, I got rid of the Sporty's for a
Yaseu/Vertex without the nav feature, and have never regretted it. If
I need an electronic aid, I use the GPS. Indeed, if it's comfortable
to do so, I avoid VORs on the theory that they must be airplane
magnets. To a lesser extent, the same must be true of VOR courses,
depending on one's distance from the VOR. Who needs places where other
airplanes congregate?)


all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

Warbird's Forum www.warbirdforum.com
Piper Cub Forum www.pipercubforum.com
the blog www.danford.net

Cub Driver ) wrote:

I am a certificated American pilot, and have been for six years. I
have never flown a VOR course and never expect to. I fly in New
Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. I have about 350 hours.

Is this VFR or IFR?

I mainly file and fly IFR in the Northeast US and I have learned that if
I am flying to or from Boston or anywhere near NYC, I must file and at
least start flying airways. The controllers will offer direct where
possible, but the volume of traffic during the peak hours often prevents
this.

In my experience, there have been a few times where the only way I could
get off the airways was to cancel IFR, weather depending.

--
Peter

Your exactly right and the use of parallel track will help that. Offset to
the right a
bit.


"Icebound" wrote in message
...
In the "good old" VOR days, it must have been pretty difficult to fly down
the centerline of an airway (or of any direct track).

So an eastbound VFR/IFR aircraft descending from 7500/7000 to his
destination, was more than likely to avoid traffic... on the reciprocal
track passing him by at 6500 or 6000... by some significant horizontal
error-distance, even if they didn't see each other (big sky theory :-) ).

GPS horizontal accuracy with WAAS is already in the order of magnitude of
a Cessna's wingspan, and some are talking about getting it down to mere
inches.

So the question is: If my Westbound Cessna at 6000 feet (with the
autopilot keeping it happily on the GPS-track centerline) meets the
descending Bonanza on the reciprocal track between the same two airports
(using a similar GPS/a-p combo), there is a distinct possibility that the
horizontal clearance may be zero...

...so is there anything in the current crop of GPS and/or Autopilot
systems that allow me to maintain a small cross-track error of my
choosing, without actually entering off-navaid-off-airport waypoints?
...or do we care; am I overly concerned???

Y'All,
To those of you who view this offset GPS program as the latest, I
would like to add the following.

At near the end of WWII when I was a 21-year old Corporal I was
the operator/mechanic of a radar bombardment simulator/trainer as a part of
the 58th Bomb Wing Training Center (B-29) on Tinian
The device was called the Supersonic Trainer and made possible simulations
of actual bombardment runs over Japan. In the week or so prior to the
dropping of the bombs I was told to put the Nagasaki
map into the Trainer.

The trainer was running in conjunction with the APQ-23 radar system. This
was the most advanced radar bombardment system of the war and was still the
standard over five years later. Among its capabiities was to program offset
bombing.. By dialing in the azmuth and distance of a target from a radar
visible target such as a lake we could fly as though bombing the lake but
hit the target. This is where
all the offset navigation came from.

Incidentally the Nagasaki bomb missed its aiming point by three miles. If
you want the full story go to my web site at the very end
of the IFR section. 7.9++ www.whittsflying.com
Gene Whitt