Just curious what methods you all are using to display your equal time points on the ND? I have always been under the impression you must use the fix page and either create a new fix or draw a circle around a real fix at the specified range. However, flying across the Pacific, most of my waypoints are lat/longs which I cannot enter into the fix page. So how can I go about entering an ETP that is defined as a fixed radial/distance from a lat./long. coordinate?

 

Regards,

Rob

 

 

I have always been under the impression you must use the fix page and either create a new fix or draw a circle around a real fix at the specified range.

 

FIX page.

 

 

 

However, flying across the Pacific, most of my waypoints are lat/longs which I cannot enter into the fix page.

 

You can't? Why?

I've tried multiple formats including the format I used on the route page and I get an invalid entry message in the scratchpad.

I've tried multiple formats including the format I used on the route page and I get an invalid entry message in the scratchpad.

 

XXNXX (Lat N Lon in the Northern Hemisphere) or XXWXX (Lat W Lon in the Southern Hemisphere) for a lot of the combinations. That all assumes whole-degree, though.

Alright, I'll give it a shot right now.

That works for me. However, for my flight from KSFO-YSSY, my first two ETOPS airports are KSFO and PHNL. The ETP is off of 21N145W unfortunately. Is there a way to create these that you know of?

The Honeywell MCDU I use in real life takes the same format as the Init page GPS position or Last position. If you enter in the same format that's in the PMDG CDU init page in the RTE page it should work just fine.

here is some answers there:

 

http://support.precisionmanuals.com/kb/a59/fmc-custom-waypoint-entry-notes.aspx

There is a simpler & more dynamic solution ...

 

If you use a flight planning tool like PFPX it will create an ETP or Equal Time Point for your two chosen Diversion Airports.  It will construct a scenario based upon this with several options (should you have set up your aircraft file correctly) to divert following a cabin decompression & or on three engines (in the case of the 744).

 

This ETP is indicated on your flightplan by a LATLON but once airborne all of your ETAs become somewhat dynamic.  You can do a quick piece of calculation from your Take Off Time to the ETA overhead your ETP via the Legs part of your flight plan or by calculating the EET (indicated along with all the other ETP data suck as position etc) from the Take Off Time.

 

This will give you a time in ZULU.

 

Enter this time at LSK6R in the following format:

 

1313z

 

This will present a small green circle with the time also in green along the magenta route of flight indicating the position of the ETP in relation to the flight time.  It will not interfere with your ACT RTE or RTE 2.

 

Its a simple as that.

Thanks for the answers everyone. I really like that idea Steve. Seems fairly straight forward. I'll use that method next time. I do use PFPX, and while I was flying last night, I realized that for each ETP, it gave me the distance in nm from each airport in addition to the distance from next waypoint. So I just entered in one of the airports on the fix page and then put in the distance as well. Then when I crossed the circle on my route, I knew that was my ETP. But your method seems even easier, especially with having PFPX.

 

Cheers,

Rob

If you have the distances from/to the next waypoint, you can also enter an additional 'along-track-waypoint' in the LEGS-page. You just have to remember the XXXX01-waypoints are your ETPs.

Gotta be careful with that, though. It doesn't matter much in the sim, but route conformance monitoring across the NATs will trigger a warning on stuff like that because your FMC path isn't matching the filed/cleared path.

 

I used to get those on my desk a decent amount at my last job.

My approach is to do the same thing we have to do in the NGX.  Enter any waypoint, such as LAX it doesn't matter, after the final segment usually the missed approach fix.  Then enter your desired ETP or whatever waypoints after that. Finally delete the LAX or whatever you used, which becomes a discontinuity.  These entries do not trigger a progress report that then get flagged because they're not part of the plan.  Got this idea from a 737 pilot that does this on 737 ETOPS flights.

That's an interesting method as well Dan. Just landed in Sydney about an hour ago after a 14 hour flight real time. After that, I'm gonna take a break from longhauls for a while. But next time I do one, I will experiment a little more with each of these methods.