Compass on Map

[Marc]

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).

Happy landings.

[NetJets_Nick]

There actually used to be something very similar to what you drew that was exclusively in ATC mode.

[Tim_B]

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.]

[Capt_D_Brown]

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