Yes – see here
is the ADF now officially dead for practical purposes? How long before the ATOs accept this fact?
I don’t think they can, all the time we have the charade of “NDB” = “instrument approach” and no formal GPS substitution concessions like they have in the USA.
Note that without DME, an appropriate route may not be available that complies with these requirements
That could be an understatement, in some locations.
The interesting point is that, at any time in the past, if the CAA IR examiner wanted to be nice to you he/she could have chosen a VOR approach instead of the NDB approach (for the nonprecision requirement). But he could never tell you this in advance. And even if you knew say a day in advance, you would still have had to train the stuff. What this new text implies is that when the examiner turns up, you can just say to him “sorry but I am not flying an NDB approach” (an “INOP” sticker on your ADF would do that nicely, too) which I do find absolutely amazing.
Err, no you can’t. You can do an ICAO IR conversion without ADF on an initial test but if you are following any other route there have been no changes.
It’s good progress for sure
In the medium term, surely this anomaly will be addressed (i.e. allow no ADF for any route to the Initial)
I was given the choice of a NDB/DME or LNAV approach for my Initial IR skills test (standard training route, not an FAA conversion). I don’t think it’s common for the GNSS option to be taken, partly because it’s not trained for that much. I assume the VNAV indicator would have been disabled but I never found out.
I did have to do an NDB hold. The nearest VOR would have required a significant diversion.
Funnily I think the only point of an NDB hold is to show you can visualise radials, intercepts and wind corrections. And there is value in being to think about these things. But these can be tested in other ways with the other NPAs and with enroute tracking.
In 2-3 years at the latest they will be relegated to same place as radio ranges and LORAN.
I think the only point of an NDB is to make the IR more difficult and keep students in the training environment longer. How can anyone even justify an instrument that is so badly designed, with so many errors, caused so many accidents and fatalities and couldn’t have been certified post 1950.
I also think MS DOS is a great way to understand the command line correctly, to improve your understanding of the system substructure… but do you need it these days to send an email? No! Aviation needs to move past it’s resistance to change (rant over!).
I don’t think NDBs will go away because
So NDBs will always need to be trained by the traditional IR training system – until there is a formal GPS substitution concession, which for some reason Europe is resisting pretty hard.
I am not saying this is smart or right but I can’t see any way around it. If the law said that you have to wear pink underpants when flying an IAP, the FTO sausage machine would have to make their students wear pink underpants and they would be completely correct in doing so. The way to tackle the charade that NDB approaches are safe etc is not to pretend they don’t exist but to provide a formal alternative.
It is sure true that the FTO system wants to maximise revenue but I don’t think many ab initio students do the IR in less than 50hrs anyway, starting from the point where you don’t even know what a VOR is. If you took out NDBs you might save 20hrs but that is only with a pilot who already knows IFR (e.g. an FAA to EASA IR converter).
With the CB IR, the minimum is 40hrs anyway.
More AOC aircraft have GPS APCH capability than you suggest. In my view a GPS substitution will come soon inEurope.
I think the issue is that NDBs are inherently pretty inaccurate as are the ADF receivers in the aircraft. Of course they can work – I have flown plenty of NDB aproaches in Australia that worked well (and many that didn’t). But they are the least accurate of the modern approaches, that is why they are deprecated.
But they are the least accurate
Not only that, but they’re also the most affected by the atmosphere, such as daytime d reflected skywaves, nighttime e reflected skywaves, coastal effect, susceptibility to thunderstorms
They also seem to be less well coordinated, and there’s no channel raster, or rather it is 1kHz but the bandwidth of the receivers is usually 3kHz or more, so you can quite often hear multiple NDB’s at different frequencies in the passband, leading to “interesting” results
While with VOR’s or ILS you can get away not listening to the audio ident, for NDB’s that’s not a good idea.
