NewChucky

You know the definitions, right? A good landing is one you can walk away from. A great landing is one you can taxi away from. It looked like you were getting the 50ft callout as you were crossing the threshold, which is the correct height for most runways.

 Yes, for me to. Forcing an FSX close just seems mean spirited. :( My internet connection is fine (clearly) and I disabled my firewall.

After a quick check, it looks to me like neither of the runways at RUQ are designated for right traffic patterns. Next time he does that, you can direct him to take a look at 14CFR 91.126( b ). If that doesn't convince him, the local FSDO might. The FAA has gone after people for violating that one.

I'd also recommend more basic introductions to IFR flying, since Trescott's book only covers the GPS aspect. There are a number of good textbooks out there, but the FAA's handbooks are pretty good and freely available: the Instrument Flying Handbook and the Instrument Procedures Handbook. Printed copies are pretty cheap, too (check Amazon). The first is an instructional guide, while the second is a more detailed reference.

'Primary source' in the context of IFR navigation (in the US) usually means the set of navigation devices that satisfy the regulations for required instruments for instrument flight (that's 91.205, if you want to read 'em). Most GPSs - even TSO'd GPSs - do not satisfy the requirements of the aviation regs for required instruments, and so are not considered 'primary navigation instruments'. This is not to say that you cannot use these GPSs as your primary instruments, bur rather you cannot depart IFR with only a functioning GPS. The WAAS GPSs, however, are approved as 'sole-source' instruments for IFR flight. The way to tell if a GPS is approved as sole-source or not is to look at the TSO it was certified under. TSO 129 is the old set of standards, TSO 146 is the new WAAS standard.I'm sure that's more detail than anyone wants, but I probably got it wrong anyway.

I'm just a private pilot, and I don't yet have my instrument rating (I'm working on it, which is why these things are fresh in my mind) so I can't comment with any authority on what the folks in the big aluminum tubes do. Most SIDs and ODPs (Obstacle Departure Procedures) are relatively simple to fly. They certainly can be flown by hand since many of us don't fly aircraft with roll steering autopilots. RNAV SIDs, which are becoming more common (KBOS just got a bunch, for example) are a little bit more complex. There are two types: A and B. Type B departures are more restrictive and "require the use of CDI/flight directors or autopilot" (I'm quoting from the Instrument Procedures Manual, page 2-28 here). I'm not sure if the requirement is CDI and flight director, or CDI or flight director. The answer to your question, though, is that it must in principle be possible to fly these procedures by hand, with the help of a flight director. As to what flight crews actually do, I can't say.

I'll be repeating some of what other people have said already, but maybe this will help. RNAV means 'area navigation', and is any navigation system that can navigate to an arbitrary point in space, rather than to/from ground-based navigational aids. GPS is one example of such a system - LORAN was another. Many early RNAV systems used inertial reference systems, usually with some form of positional cross-checking. Those of us who use the Level-D 767 are familiar with that kind of system. I believe the cross-checking is DME-DME. The answer to whether airliners use inertial reference or GPS is 'it depends'. Most airliners being built today (well, all, as far as I know) do use GPS as their primary nav source. Some of the earlier glass cockpit planes do not (757s and 767s, for instance). Some airliners don't have RNAV capability at all. This weekend I'll be on a Dash-8 that just has VORs and a DME.As for which aircraft GPSs are RNAV devices: any GPS which is certified for use as an IFR GPS is by definition an RNAV device. Certification requirements are laid out in various Technical Standards Orders or TSOs. Hand-held GPSs - even when mounted in the aircraft panel somehow - are never certified for use. The Garmin G4xx and G5xx units are certified, as is the device in the G1000. There are a number of certified GPSs from King as well - the KLN94 is the most well known, I believe. There are plenty of others for larger aircraft, and presumably more for light planes as well. The point is, though, many many GA aircraft are RNAV equipped.

I'm a little confused by this thread. I've been following any information I can find about PMDG's upcoming projects, but I haven't once seen any deadlines from them.

For availability, I have heard within a week, but we'll see about that. The Sandy Bridge processors look to be pretty power efficient - substantially better than the earlier architectures - so you won't need anything more, and you might be able to get away with less. I'm seriously thinking it may be time to upgrade, finally. I think the i5 2500K is just what I need.Charles B.

I don't really expect anything less than top quality from ORBX at this point (well, I reached that point a while ago) but I find their KORS is strikingly beautiful - or maybe better strikingly 'real'. I'm quite impressed, even given my expectations from them.

Now I'm really starting to get interested. A 'realistic' failure model that lets me complete my flights without too much drama but actually makes me keep an eye on the diagnostics is exactly what I've been wanting for a long time. I have a couple of questions about it though. Is there any way it would be able to interact with the FSX mission structure? It might be fun to have people put together training flights so that we don't know what's coming, but have something a little bit more structured than a random generator. Another minor feature that I would love is a little bit of startup randomization - switch positions and things like that, which I guess aren't outright failures. My experience flying real aircraft is that you never know how the last pilot left the aircraft - maybe a transponder left to the old squawk code, maybe the autopilot switch still on (that's always good for a laugh!), maybe the battery switch left on overnight.... I find in FSX after a certain number of flights I start doing my startup to a given panel state since I know which switches I don't even need to check. These are pretty minor issues, I guess.Of course, none of this will likely matter to me, since it looks more and more like you're going to manage to release it right when I'm in the middle of writing up my thesis. :( Oh, well. - Charles

I actually found my framerates went up in most of the PNW area. No idea why, but I'm not complaining. My specs are a bit worse than yours. They have a demo for PNW, I think. Why not give it a try to see how it performs?

A number of the new RNAV ones at Boston don't (see here. The LBSTA2 (currently LBSTA1), for example, is used for daytime trans-Atlantic deptartures. - Charles

Gotcha, thanks. Getting off topic, but I was in Little Rock a few weeks back, and it occurred to me that, as far as I know, there's no Dassault Falcon for FSX. Ahem. :(

So does this mean that you are planning to upgrade your entire bizjet line to the level of the Citation X 2.0?