John Pearson wrote:
How would I normally
determine the distance from a waypoint?
depends on the type of waypoint and the navigation equipment
in your aircraft, if it's a navaid such as a NDB or VOR you
could do some simple time/distance checks, e.g. by flying with
a 90 (45/30) degree relative bearing offset from an abitrary
navaid in order to see how many degrees bearing change (an angle)
will be covered in a certain amount of time - based on your
groundspeed you can calculate your distance to the corresponding
navaid.
A simple example: ( a bit tought without drawing ...)
o magnetic heading = 035
o relative bearing = 060
=> the navaid is to your right side
=> you correct your heading so that the rel. bearing becomes
approx. 85 degrees, so you turn 20 degrees to the left
=> then you note down the amount of time it takes until the
relative bearing is increased to 095 degrees
based on the bearing change by 10 degrees you can do a
time/distance calculation, like:
(time to station in minutes) = (stopped time in sec) / (bearing change)
If it took 80 seconds for a 10 degree bearing change to take place
in the above example and we were travelling at a groundspeed of 120 kt
that would mean:
distance to station in minutes = 80/10
distance to station in minutes = 8
Which means, it would take 8 minutes at 120 kt to get to the station.
And that comes down to (120/60) *8 = 16 miles distance.
Hope everything's correct ...
How exactly you determine the bearing change depends however
on the type of navaid, or rather instrument that's in use -
an ADF or RMI is pretty straight forward, as the relative
bearing can be easily obtained, a VOR instrument is a bit
more involved, as you need to manually change the OBS.
If you can really easily determine the distance from a certain
waypoint depends also on the type of waypoint, so for example
nowadays many waypoints are not marked by conventional
intersection or merely navaids, but are rather determined by
imaginary fixes based on GPS coordinates.
So, you cannot really use any waypoint in a normal aircraft,
waypoints that are specific to GPS or RNAV equipment are mostly
meant to be used only by airliners that have the corresponding
systems ...
If you want to practice some of the basic stuff that can
also come in handy during your real flight training you
should google for "instrument flight" / "instrument navigation"
or "instrument interpretation" tutorials, some of the more advanced
tutorials like the ones at http://www.navfltsm.addr.com/index.htm
are pretty accurate if you take into account that they are actually
only meant to be used for gaming purposes.
But there are numerous other webpages and forums that offer such
tutorials, some of them run by aviation enthusiasts, others by
aviators themselves - for example, some very good stuff can be
found at: http://www.stoenworks.com/Aviation home page.html
(that webpage is run by a former commercial pilot, who's now
retired and seems to be really into flight simulators)
In order to visualize some of the illustrated techniques you could also
use a very popular free web applet:
http://www.visi.com/~mim/nav/
Also, if you are going to attend flight training, anyway you might
want to have a look at http:/www.pprune.org - where you can find
numerous professionals and thousands of archived postings which
cover pretty much any question topic that could come to your mind,
I'm sure you'll find it a very informative resource !
----------
Boris
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