"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...

What's a little silly is that there's also an ILS-16 which gets you the
standard 200 & 1/2, so except as a contingency against the ILS being
OTS, having the LNAV/VNAV approach doesn't buy you anything.

There's significant labor involved in charting a new approach- obstacle
analysis, airspace planning, test-flying, etc. My guess is that where there
is an ILS already, creating an LNAV/VNAV approach is relatively low-cost
since you can piggyback on most of the existing labor.

Likewise, I suspect most of the new approaches we'll see over the next year
or two will be added to fields already equipped with an ILS. Lots of fields
here in the Northeast have an ILS but only on one runway end. I suspect in
five years or so every airport with air carrier traffic will have a
precision approach to every runway end. Somewhere along the way, we'll start
to see a trickle of these come to fields that currently have published
approaches but no ILS.

Another issue is that right now only airlines can really make use of this
stuff anyway, since relatively few people are flying behind v2 GNS-480s.
This is why Jane Garvey said in her AOPA speech that it's important for
pilots to go out and get new equipment that can make use of this. Of course,
I'd like to see her agency help by making it easier to certify and install
such equipment. There's no reason it should cost $15,000 to do so.

-cwk.