Roy Smith wrote:

wrote:

I'll wager that the 400/430/500/530 don't have sufficient memory for airways.

How much memory could it possibly take? Let's do a back of the envelope
calcultion. Assumptions:

500 airways in the country
Each airway is 1000 miles long on average
There's a waypoint every 20 miles on average.

So, you've got an average of 50 waypoints per airway times 500 airways,
equals 25,000 data points. The waypoints themselves are already in
memory, you just need references to them, say 4 bytes for a reference.
That's 100 kbytes of memory to store all the airways in the continental
US. Figure a Mbyte to store them for the entire world.

I'm typing this on a laptop with 256 Mbytes of ram. My digital camera
has the same. It's just absurd that memory limits in a $20k box should
prevent you from storing airways.

I'm not saying it's not true. Just that it's absurd :-)

Then there is the issue of firmware and processor time to sort out all those
waypoints and nail them together correctly. And, where do you then place them for
a long, or complex route, when the box has a 30 waypoint limitation per flight
plan?

Also, there are many, many, mid-route airway transitions, such as V-264 joining
V-137 eastbounc, east of Ontario, California. Those all have five numbers, rather
than 5 letters, and I bet you can't find them in a 400/430/500/530.

Here is the one I mentioned, which is part of the V-264 route description in NACO's
Digital Aeronautical Information database. This waypoint would be used only for
the eastbound flight on V-264 that is cleared to transition onto V-137. That takes
some software smarts to figure all that out. Then again, a Boeing 767 was able to
perform such a sort in 1980.

V137 15419 34 05 49.8 116 54 33.5 ZLA AWY INT