Victor Airways in Clearance

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 04:07:01 GMT, "Wyatt Emmerich"
wrote:

I fly with a Garmin 530. Great box, but I cannot for the life of me
understand why they would fail to include Victor Airways. Anyway, I often
get a clearance such as 210BA cleared to Yodoo, Clear City, Victor 245,
Bogur.

Now if I program the Garmin 530 for Yodoo, Clear City, Bogur, 19 times our
of 20 I'm fine. ATC was just throwing in the Victor 245 for--I don't
know--clarification? However, one in 20 times there's a kink in the airway
and I'll screw up if I don't check the low altitude chart.

So instead of simply programming the Garmin 530 with the waypoints, I've got
to unfold the chart, figure out where the heck I am on it and make sure
Victor 245 doesn't have a bend in the road. In real IMC involves a lot of
looking down and head movement when I would rather be focused on my scan.

My point being: It would be a heck of a lot easier for Garmin 530 users if
ATC would dispense with the airway part of the clearance and just route us
base on waypoints.

Probably a bit late, but the CNX80 can accept victor airways in its
flightplans. Hopefully Garmin will borrow this piece of code from the
CNX80 and port it to the GNS series.

-Nathan

Nathan Young wrote:

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 04:07:01 GMT, "Wyatt Emmerich"
wrote:

I fly with a Garmin 530. Great box, but I cannot for the life of me
understand why they would fail to include Victor Airways. Anyway, I often
get a clearance such as 210BA cleared to Yodoo, Clear City, Victor 245,
Bogur.

Now if I program the Garmin 530 for Yodoo, Clear City, Bogur, 19 times our
of 20 I'm fine. ATC was just throwing in the Victor 245 for--I don't
know--clarification? However, one in 20 times there's a kink in the airway
and I'll screw up if I don't check the low altitude chart.

So instead of simply programming the Garmin 530 with the waypoints, I've got
to unfold the chart, figure out where the heck I am on it and make sure
Victor 245 doesn't have a bend in the road. In real IMC involves a lot of
looking down and head movement when I would rather be focused on my scan.

My point being: It would be a heck of a lot easier for Garmin 530 users if
ATC would dispense with the airway part of the clearance and just route us
base on waypoints.

Probably a bit late, but the CNX80 can accept victor airways in its
flightplans. Hopefully Garmin will borrow this piece of code from the
CNX80 and port it to the GNS series.

-Nathan

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

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 :-)

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