I've dicided to take time out from flying IFR, and do some good old VFR flying with nothing but a sectional, plotter, stopwatch, and paper & pencil. In otherwords, no GPS, no VOR and no ADF.I'm going to use the F1 C152 and recreate my cross country flights from my PPL training days. I have a current sectional for my local area, and it shows the current magnetic variation, but I know the data in FS isn't current. How do I look up the magnetic variation in FS for a given airport?

Try here for US http://www.airnav.com/airports/

Hi.At the airport in question, go into slew mode; rotate the plane toward 360 deg; then press the spacebar to get aligned with the True North; the difference is the magnetic variation.All the best.

That won't do any good. Like I said, I have current charts that show current mag var, but FS doesn't use current data.

Thanks, that works, but I wish there was a way to look it up without starting FS though.

>Thanks, that works, but I wish there was a way to look it up>without starting FS though.If you've got AFCAD, display the airfield in question in AFCAD and then go to 'Properties' in the File menu.The Properties dialog box displays, among other things, the magnetic deviation within FS for that location.Mike Want

with an addon like FSNavigator you can read the MagVar from navaid info pop-ups. Doesn't FS9's internal map give the same info. I'm away from my own pc right now, hence I can't check myself. Stephan

That was the first thing I checked, but it doesn't. :(

I think the data FS2004 uses is probably from 2001-2002 time period. Magnetic variation does change all the time but the amount of change is very small. A bit of a side note here, nautical charts unlike aeronautical charts are updated every several years not every 56 days (for IFR charts) or 6 months (for VFR charts) but they give the annual rate of change for variation. From most of the charts I've used, the annual rate of change varies from .05' to .1' every year.So the current real-world charts should not be too far off from the sim world of FS2004.The aeronautical chart also gives you the date of the magnetic variation data. For a Dec 25 2003 Los Angeles Sectional, on the legend panel for the chart, in the miscellaneous section at the bottom of the legend panel, it states the magnetic variation is from 2000. which should predate the MS2004 data and be accurate enough for your purposes.Hope this helpsSteve / KMVL

You're right. Using Naji's tip, FS shows a mag var of 3

Hi,If you want, with a small xml gauge somewhere on your panel, you can read MagVar whereever you are:%((A:MagVar,degrees))%!d!or something.Jan