Could be a good lifesaver 172driver!
Not so much a lifesaver as a great tool Doing Non precision approaches. Approaches in low vis. It just helps your SA tremendously. Stick the FPM on the end of the runway and you are done.
I think it can be both. For fun, after that real-world test I flew the RNAV/GPS approach to rwy 26 at Big Bear on my sim (X-plane) at night coupled to ForeFlight on the iPad. Pretty damn impressive SA! For those who don’t know: Big Bear (L35) is an airport located in a mountain valley east of L.A. @ 6750ft, surrounded by mountains that range from 8300 to 10000 ft.
JasonC wrote:
I disagree with that – it is the present. Like it or not.
Well someone on an unrelated topic begged to differ. 
He could not see his flight school going EFIS ever. Well at least not in the next couple of years…..
The majority of aircraft still has steam gauges, and it’s not part of the standard PPL syllabus yet, so, not quite the present just yet.
mh wrote:
This won’t go, because DME/DME needs much more avionics on the aircraft end and you will need some backup over GPS/GLONASS/Galileo, even if you count in SBAS. They might be reduced, but not go totally. Unless you come up with a cheap stand alone DME/DME navigation system.
Who says GA is relevant, when they decommission a VOR?
If CAT doesn’t need it anymore it will just be turned off.
A DME/DME FMS would be very useful if GPS goes pear-shaped one day.
mh wrote:
This won’t go, because DME/DME needs much more avionics on the aircraft end and you will need some backup over GPS/GLONASS/Galileo, even if you count in SBAS.
Why are VORs relevant for GA, now that everyone flying IFR practically needs at least a BRNAV capable GNSS receiver?
We now (or soon) have 3 independent GNSS systems (GPS, Glonass, Galileo) operating on many different frequency bands. What is the (realistic) threat model that all three systems fail simultaneously?
I can only see World War 4, but then we’ll have much bigger problems than finding our destination in bad weather.
There are some practicalities right now that need fixing, namely that no certified receiver is capable of anything else than GPS and that some “experts” in Europe still think that Glonass cannot be used for aviation because “it uses an ECEF (earth centered earth fixed) coordinate system” (which every GPS receiver uses as well) – but I guess this will be sorted in time when the last VOR is switched off.
Furthermore, some people within EASA think that radar vectors are an adequate backup for GNSS going haywire.
NB: I’d not be surprised if there will be NDBs surviving the last VOR being shut down – an NDB costs almost nothing to run, while a VOR is rather expensive, monitoring and calibration and land use wise.
BeechBaby wrote:
I always felt the airspeed ticker tape lagged
I’ve noticed the same on the Aspen, but then for the whole screen. It’s noticable when banking positively, or turning positively. You can “see” the screen updates at a fairly low frame rate, that lags behind the actual. I’ve wondered how overloaded the processor gets when you add the synthetic vision…
Mind you this is a problem that might disappear in the next 10 years or so with Moore’s law. (in the cockpit)
A_and_C wrote:
the speed and allitude tapes are easy to use
I find them counterintuitive at times. The airspeed tape moves down when you accelerate. It moves up when you decelerate. Same for the altimeter. The tape goes down when you go up and it goes up when you go down.
And then you start to climb and decelerate, or accelerate and descend. Has lead to a nice little vertigo because one tape moves up and one tape moves down around your AH…
I have to imagine terminal VOR stations will remain for some years yet, I think in the US they’ve already started talking about getting rid of the en-route ones in the near future.
How can VORs not be relevant for GA?! Entrust your navigation to a silicon chip? Surely you jest. Next thing you know people are going to say a computer is better at engine management as well.
Shorrick_Mk2 wrote:
How can VORs not be relevant for GA?!
You know, I got criticized at the annual IR checkride this week for using a VOR for guidance during the self lineup and the GPS for verifying I’m doing ok. He would have preferred using the GPS for track guidance and the VOR receiver to check whether the VOR is still transmitting correctly
I’m still shocked
