The problem – in the UK, at least – is that the examiner (not you) decides which NP approach to give you.
Same in Germany of course, the examiner tells the student what he wants to see. However, NDB in Germany is luckily pretty much a thing of the past and all instructors I know tell students that it’s more of historical and academic interest and would be substituted by GPS in real life. Very few NDBs remain and whenever one needs repair/service, it gets turned off instead. Same for VORs, they are massively scaling down on the number of VORs here, removing them altogether for enroute purposes and only keeping them as a backup for approaches. A good example of this logic is EDDS (Stuttgart) which used to have its standard approaches going over VORs. The southern VOR (TGO Tango) was decommissioned last year and the STAR changed to go over the airfield and do a procedure turn. That is of course a nonsense approach but it only serves backup purposes with 100% of the approaches being radio vectored. The drawback is that one cannot practise a “standard approach” (or “procedure” as some call it) because you’d be totally in the way of everyone else…
Alexis is right, DMEs are often required for ILS in Germany. The reason is that an ILS requires a distance check and the marker beacons have mostly been removed in Germany. DME readings serve those distance checks.
What’s the risk of doing a Direct to the DME station (“AGB”) on GPS2? Is it true that sometimes they are not where they “seem” to be for the GPS?
DMEs can be programmed to have an offset so GPS substitution has to be done with care. Jepp charts usually give the distance to the threshold as well which is safer.
Yes – that’s one risk, avoidable if you know exactly what you are doing and you happen to find a GPS waypoint which corresponds precisely to the DME=0 equivalent location. I vaguely recall these exist in some GPS databases though I don’t recall seeing anything like that in the KLN94.
The other one is that the EU has no formal GPS-for-navaid substitution (only the USA, and I think a few other countries, have anything like that) and that leaves you with the obvious regulatory problem: if an approach is based on a DME, and there is no radar-for-DME substitution concession (often there is), and there is no GPS-for-navaid substitution concession (never is in the EU) then if you don’t have a working DME the whole thing becomes nonsense and
It isn’t going to happen 
Apart from anything else, most commercial (AOC) operators can’t fly GPS approaches (how many even have a GPS?) so the pretence has to be maintained.
Conversely this means that the moment EASA allows any form of GPS-for-navaid substitution, the sky will fall in and everything will change. A lot of people don’t want that to happen.
the European GPS Galileo is not yet working or licensed for use. GPS and Glonass can easily be shut-off by the US resp. Russia. At this moment it would be unwise to uninstall ILS or VORs in the European countries.
The US was against “Galileo” – see famous Secretary of Defense Letter http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Galileo_-Wolfowitz_-Letter.jpg
Apart from anything else, most commercial (AOC) operators can’t fly GPS approaches (how many even have a GPS?) so the pretence has to be maintained.
That surprises me, never heard of an AOC that wouldn’t fly RNAV. Every crew in Europe needs BRNAV anyway.
You do not need a substitution concession, you can use any means as long as you carry the original equipment. That is for private ops.
pointless ILS and other test flights and go to LPV
They do test flights for LPV as well.
< sarcasm > you know someone might have bent the satellite antenna and nobody noticed < / sarcasm >
the European GPS Galileo is not yet working or licensed for use. GPS and Glonass can easily be shut-off by the US resp. Russia. At this moment it would be unwise to uninstall ILS or VORs in the European countries.
Surely nobody really believes the US would switch off GPS? I don’t.
Surely nobody really believes the US would switch off GPS? I don’t.
I would rephrase that: in any scenario where the US switches off GPS over Europe, we have other bigger problems. In those scenarios, Galileo would be shut down as well.
I’m all in favour of having fully parallel redundant SBAS systems – but the scenarios covering for involve human error/accidental outages, not wholesale switching off of the system.
My only (small) concern with GPS is how easily it can be jammed. More needs to be done to raise public awareness of how bad the effect of casual GPS jamming can be (don’t worry, the terrorists will know already, you’re not giving anything away by publicising this).
