In July there was a feature suggestion for a festure, I personally would find very useful.
Since a lot of stuff regarding the map has changed since then, I would like to bring this up again.
It’s a feature which existed once, but was removed for some reason: The compass on the pilot and ATC map.
It is a very useful navigation tool, especially right now when we have a globe as a map and a 90 degrees heading doesn’t look like a 90 degrees heading on the map.
It would also be useful for ATC helping us planning approaches or departures.
Here is a picture of the idea (please ignore my terrible drawning skills).
There are hundreds of these scattered across the map, in the form of VORs, and they, unlike this larger one, account for magnetic deviation/offset . I’m not sure if a compass of the sort you suggest would account for this the same way as the VORs do now, but I would certainly need to know that it did before asking for it.
This is triply-true now that we have a much larger space in which to fly, with greater variance in the deviation/offset than we saw while constrained to relatively-smal regions Surely we’ve all noticed 090 near the equator is quite different from 090 near the tip of Greenland.or that a straight line over a long distance offer requires constant Bearing changes (other than that which can be explained by wind correction).
For now, checking a nearby VOR serves the same purpose, even if rudimentary and perhaps slightly inefficient. But it’s certainly better than a gigantic compass which, depending on the area it covers due to zoom setting, may be quite inaccurate in places.
If this can be accounted for, awesome; more power to you. If not, it might honesty be counfer-productive.
[This is not intended as a shoot-down of the idea. Simply pointing out a significant consideration.]
Yeah you do have a good point. not that it is a bad idea, but there are a lot of navigation aids and deviations have to be accounted for. An interesting read
