NCYankee wrote:
In the US, VOR’s are being decommissioned, but not DME. When a VOR-DME or VORTAC is decommissioned, the DME remains to be available to support DME-DME RNAV. In fact some places, DME’s are being added.
France does the same.
For en-route phase, VOR are decommissioned. The RNAV en-route will rely on GNSS or DME/DME.
For aproach, at startegic airports (about 35), it was decided to keep the ILS and the maintenance under control of the DGAC.
At non-strategic airports (about 60), ILS are being removed or transferred to airport operators if operators wish to keep the infrastructure. In this case, the airport operator is in charge of the maintenance.
In all cases, the DGAC is going to provide a RNAV GNSS approach with LPV minima to (almost) each IFR airport runway end’s by 2017.
Well it seems I overlooked the AIRAC update cycle for June, which introduces three new LPV approaches into the UK (more than doubling our current figure).
Wick (EGPE), Campbeltown (EGEC) and Barrow/Walney Island (EGNL) all publish plates which become active on 23 June.
Surprisingly, I can find no trace of an NDB anywhere near Campbeltown – the missed approach is all GPS waypoints and requires a 5% climb gradient.
Barrow does have an NDB onsite but the missed approach uses GPS waypoints.
Even more surprising, the LPV minima for Barrow Runway 35 is 201 feet – so it’s one of the very first 200 feet LPVs in Europe.
I believe all three are AFIS rather than ATC controlled.
As with Kirkwall, the Scottish ones are for Approved Operators Only and require PPR. Walney/Barrow is I think also quite restricted to general public and PPR only, but there are no specific restrictions attached to the RNAV approach plate itself.
So it seems that the UK CAA can be persuaded to approve an LPV 200 approach manned by AFIS with a GPS only missed approach sequence.
I’m still unclear on why Kirkwall chose the NDB for their missed approach fix (when their ILS uses the VOR). Sounds like perhaps this wasn’t CAA imposed as I originally thought.
PS: The coverage map that Guillaume linked to above has some target monthly dates for many UK airports, but specific (day) dates for a few (including the above). I note that Biggin Hill and St Mary’s are due out in September, which should please Timothy. But Shoreham remains a generic “2016” which could mean anything.
That Approved Operators bullsh*t in the Scotland should be challenged ASAP. Timothy, you’re at it?
A_and_C wrote:
A GPS / VOR /DME with optional Loran C unit was built and marketed by Narco some years back as the Narco STARNAV however GA failed to understand this multi-Sensor unit and as always driven by price
It may also have been that for years Narco has been known as “Not A Radio Company” (although I’m probably a bit salty about my Narco COM radio failing 18 months before it should have).
Alioth
You are quite correct NARCO was never at the top end of the Avionic market, their performance was very variable with some of the kit being very good like the VOR/DME RNAV, and some of the NAV/COM’s. The ADF’s & DME units unfortunaly should never have been put on the market, I never got more than 45 NM lock on with the Narco DME in my PA28 and yet this week the KN64 that was aimed at the bottom of the GA market locked on at 110 NM at 6000 ft inbound to the Isle of Man.
JnsV wrote:
But this results from the fact that DME, in spite of its name, does not display distance from the station at all time, but in many cases something else. This comes from a time when it was not easy to simply define an arbitrary sequence of points as an approach. With GPS (or multi-sensor FMS) it is now possible, therefore IAP designs should utilise this capability completely. And the discrepancy between the DME value and the GPS distance is more like an argument for removing references to DMEs in IAPs, not for the carriage of DME…
Frankly, how hard is it to understand that if a procedure uses DME, you’re supposed to use DME? If you decide to deviate from a procedure in an unapproved manner, you better know what you’re doing. And it’s not always a question of DME distance being different from GPS distance, sometimes the pilot simply navigates using the wrong station/ point. I guess it’s hard to identify it when your GPS isn’t a DME receiver.
AFAIK ICAO didn’t allow RNAV waypoints for ILS and the like (and RNAV has been around for quite a long time). That has changed, although I don’t think it’s in force yet.
boscomantico,
I am up to my neck in so many campaigns at the moment that approved operators may just be the last straw.
I’ll see if anyone else on the PPL/IR ExCo will run with it.
how hard is it to understand that if a procedure uses DME, you’re supposed to use DME
Indeed; an IR or IMCR holder is supposed to be able to fly a published procedure as it is charted and if it gives a DME distance then there is absolutely zero, zilch, nowt, no reason on earth whatsoever why a GPS should be usable instead for that distance.
That Approved Operators bullsh*t in the Scotland should be challenged ASAP
Please avoid using the words s**t (and f**k, too) in full because they can blacklist EuroGA from corporate access, etc. I have to edit this stuff when I see it.
The UK has a long history of “approved operator only” procedures, at AFIS airfields. That is one of the concessions to being able to do it without full ATC. For example Goodwood (AFIS) has (has had) such procedures for a King Air ambulance service. Same I believe with Wellesbourne. The procedures are supposedly secret because they are – wait for it – the intellectual property of the commercial operator. The local schools use them for IMC training 
and I have a collection of them…
So what they have done in Scotland is to publish them but the operator still needs an approval? What’s the point?
at the moment that approved operators may just be the last straw
What would benefit many more IR holders would be some attention to Part-Med – an area which has been totally forgotten in all this “CB IR” and “EIR” business. We still have the old JAA audiogram where one bad ear prevents you getting an IR … unless you follow some under the table route which the CAA doesn’t want to discuss openly and which most AMEs don’t know about.
Martin wrote:
Frankly, how hard is it to understand that if a procedure uses DME, you’re supposed to use DME? If you decide to deviate from a procedure in an unapproved manner, you better know what you’re doing. And it’s not always a question of DME distance being different from GPS distance, sometimes the pilot simply navigates using the wrong station/ point. I guess it’s hard to identify it when your GPS isn’t a DME receiver.
You misunderstood what I wrote. I was trying to reason that the fact that flying a DME-based approach with a GPS might lead to an accident was not a good argument for the inclusion of non-RNAV components into RNAV approaches, it would rather be an argument for the opposite.
Peter wrote:
So what they have done in Scotland is to publish them but the operator still needs an approval? What’s the point?
They have to publish them so they make it into the nav databases for the operator’s FMS / GPS systems, as flying GPS approaches with user defined waypoints is not normally permitted.
