7 minutes ago, PTI139 said:

Yes, I considered that either 🙂

But this workaround only works if the desired VOR is on the first page of the „Nearest“ page.

But better than nothing...

Entering the VOR frequency will also give you the DME (if it is in range).

The NEAREST function is a bit faster if you don't want to enter the frequency digit by digit. That's the beauty of the Garmin.

15 hours ago, jon b said:

I heard a story of one guy in the old days (90s) somehow  mistakenly enter EGKK instead of EGLL out of habit in the POS INIT page and make it all the way to ocean entry west of  Scotland before the mistake was spotted and they had to turn round and come back to realign the IRS as they couldn’t make the crossing.

Could be worse, these guys took off without even aligning their system, with predictably fatal results. Ironically, the crash almost certainly would not have occurred if they had waited just another 28 seconds for the alignment to complete before commencing their taxy.

I watched an air crash investigation program on that incident.

Sometimes it’s important to know when to just sit on your hands.

10 minutes ago, Chock said:

Could be worse, these guys took off without even aligning their system, with predictably fatal results. Ironically, the crash almost certainly would not have occurred if they had waited just another 28 seconds for the alignment to complete before commencing their taxy.

Something similar may have happened with KAL007, the Korean Airlines 747 that was shot down in 1983 by Soviet fighters after straying off course and entering Russian airspace.

The flight took off from Anchorage with Seoul as the final destination.

This was before GPS and FMS existed, but INS was available and was, at the time, “state of the art” for long range navigation over water.

That aircraft was equipped with 1st generation Delco Carousel INS systems, that would hold only 9 waypoints at a time, and all of which had to be manually programmed by keying in the full latitude and longitude of each waypoint. 

Standard practice was to enter the ramp starting position and first 9 waypoints on one of the three INS CDUs, and then transfer the coordinates to the other two INS units. In KAL, this was normally done by the first officer.

One theory of what went wrong was that the FO made an error in entering the longitude for the ramp starting coordinates - entering 160 degrees west instead of the correct 150 degrees. The INS would have flashed a warning light to indicate there was a disparity between the entered position and the stored “last known position”, but that same light was used for other types of INS errors, (some of which were  not actually errors), so flight crews may have developed a sense of complacency about seeing the warning light come on “it’s just a glitch”.

If the FO either did not see, or chose to ignore the warning light, and hit the enter key, the (incorrect) starting coordinates would have been accepted with no further issues.

Even if every succeeding waypoint had been entered correctly, a 10 degree longitude error in the starting position on the ramp at Anchorage would have resulted in the flight path the aircraft actually flew, vs. the flight path the aircraft should have followed. It would have gone farther and farther north of the correct path as the flight progressed, until it eventually entered Soviet air space.

 

13 minutes ago, jon b said:

Sometimes it’s important to know when to just sit on your hands.

Well that was kind of the problem; they were sitting on their hands in the lounge drinking coffee instead of being out at the aeroplane, so when they finally noticed what time it was and that everyone was on board, they legged it out to the plane and went through the pre-flight in seconds then cranked up and set off. The CVR recorded sounds of them apparently trying to align it in the air as they flew though clouds heading toward a mountain. Unfortunately, they were not flying the Steam version of the ATR.

Edited August 31, 20205 yr by Chock

16 hours ago, jon b said:

Yep, don’t know about the 737 but the 747 gave you the option to enter a displacement figure in meters in case you made a departure from an intersection

I think the 737 had either that or runway remaining (probably carrier option..I am not a real 737 pilot by any means).

The whole notion of a position shift introduces a temporary nav error when you had to depart from a runway with a displaced threshold, since negative values were not permitted. 

1 hour ago, GearUp180 said:

Entering the VOR frequency will also give you the DME (if it is in range).

One where in the 172 classic would you see the VOR DME, and two "if it's in range" why would you see it on the nearest but not on the DME.

The GNS530 has legacy DME capability but I just figured that was another feature that was not yet implemented in the sim. Does it work anywhere in the sim? I tried initially, but could never get it to show any readings so I thought it was just inop in the sim (like a lot of other things with these half-baked default avionics)

38 minutes ago, FPStewy said:

One where in the 172 classic would you see the VOR DME, and two "if it's in range" why would you see it on the nearest but not on the DME.

It is on the GNS530, first nav page under the NAV1 selection box. There is another box that shows (well should if it were implemented) the VOR identifier code, selected radial and the DME distance.

35 minutes ago, snglecoil said:

It is on the GNS530, first nav page under the NAV1 selection box. There is another box that shows (well should if it were implemented) the VOR identifier code, selected radial and the DME distance.

that's one way of doing it. The GNS is probably my biggest disappointment of the sim, realityxp, flight1, XP all had functional GNS's 5 years ago. This is basically a cut and paste from fsx.

4 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

This was before GPS and FMS existed, but INS was available and was, at the time, “state of the art” for long range navigation over water.

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in trying out a fairly accurate INS system there is a very enjoyable simulation of the Delco Carousel that I've used with older jetliners (and the Concorde!).   Using it will give you a really solid understanding of DME-DME updates.   I haven't tried it yet to see if it works with MSFS, but IIRC it uses Simconnect and it's up to date enough to work with P3D, so it'd probably function.