This article is about flying low and slow, flying small airplanes navigating from town to town, following roads or railroads, or flying up a river through a mountain pass. VFR flying is a whole different world of flying than IFR and FS2004 really makes VFR a lot more exciting. This article mainly applies to flying in Microsoft Flight Simulator; however it may apply to other civilian simulators as well.

There are three sections to this article. The first is VFR 101 which in this edition will explain different ways to navigate when flying VFR. The other section is VFR Downloads which lists add-ons that can really enhance your VFR experience. The third is VFR Hardware which contains some items you may wish to have to supplement your VFR experience.

If you haven't flown anything but Boeings and Airbuses I invite you to take a little time and try out a different type of flying which can be just as challenging or just as relaxed as you wish.

VFR 101: VFR Navigation

Even though most of the world is covered in networks of Airways between VOR's and NDB's, it is still important to know how to get from A to B without any fancy electronic devices. This basic form of navigation is called "dead reckoning". It may seem old fashioned but it is still taught to all pilots and is very important even today.

Dead reckoning is basically navigating by taking out a map and drawing a line between the waypoints. Unfortunately it's not as simple as it sounds; there are a lot of factors involved that you have to calculate first.

The best way to do this for flight simulator users is to use a real world VFR navigation chart (called sectionals in the US). You can buy these at nearly any flying club, and quite often flying clubs will have old outdated ones they can't use and may give them to you for free! If you don't have a real chart you can also use road maps and follow the roads between towns, or you can use the flight simulator flight planner. You can download the US sectionals at this website http://aviationtoolbox.org/raw_data/FAA_sectionals/current/. You can also find sectionals in JPG format in the FlightSim.Com file library.

They are rather large to print however.

For this example I will be planning a flight from Nanaimo BC (CYCD) to Boundary Bay (CZBB) which are located near Vancouver, British Columbia. First I will explain how to make up a flight plan using a VNC/Sectional. After, I will explain how to plan the same flight using the FS2004 flight planner. To make things simple I will only use two waypoints, those being the airports themselves.

The first method will be using the Vancouver VFR Navigation Chart. The first step is to take a pencil and a ruler and draw a straight line between the two airports, Nanaimo and Boundary Bay. This is our track line, the line we will fly along. The next step is to measure the distance between them. You can get rulers made for sectional charts that will have the distance marked off in Nautical Miles which makes this a bit quicker, but with a normal ruler simply measure the distance, then determine the distance in nautical miles (nm) by placing the ruler beside the scale at the bottom of the chart. Using my chart ruler I measured a distance of approximately 34 nm.

Now we have to find out which heading to fly to get from Nanaimo to Boundary Bay. To find out the heading we will use a protractor. As with the ruler you can get a protractor made specifically for these charts, but you can use a regular protractor. On the chart there are black lines with little ticks across them that run up and down, and another set that run across left to right. These are lines of Latitude and Longitude. We will use the lines that run north to south to find out our heading. Find a line that runs north and south across our track line. Line up the protractor with the north to south line and measure the angle between your track and the line, with 0 degrees on the protractor lined up with North (up). That will be your heading. If you are using a simple semi circle protractor and you want to find out a heading for a westerly track, you will need to subtract the angle from 360 degrees to find out the heading. An aviation protractor obviously will save a lot of confusion here. I measured a heading of 88 degrees.

Unfortunately we aren't done with the heading yet. This is our True heading. In our airplane we fly our headings referring to the compass, which shows a magnetic heading. We have to take magnetic variation into effect to figure out what magnetic heading to fly. On the chart magnetic variation lines are shown. On Canadian charts they are dotted blue lines with a number marked somewhere on them and whether it is west or east variation. They can be hard to spot. The one closest to our path reads 20 E, or 20 degrees of east magnetic variation. Now we have to convert our true heading to magnetic. We do this by adding or subtracting our variation. You subtract east variation and add west. (You can remember this by the saying East is Least and West is Best). Now we take 88 degrees true, subtract 20 degrees variation and get 68 degrees magnetic.

Now that we have our track drawn, the distance calculated and the heading figured out, we need to copy this down onto our flight plan. We will just use a simple chart for this. One way to help us know how far we have to go once in the air is to know how long it will take with our airplane. For this example I will be using a Piper Archer and will be cruising at 120 kts. (We will ignore the difference between TAS and IAS for this example.) Travelling 34 nm at 120 kts takes us 17 minutes. Now we know if we've been flying for 25 minutes and haven't spotted Boundary Bay we probably have flown past it, and if we have only flown for 5 minutes that we have a bit to go. To make this more accurate we would need to correct for the effect of the wind but for the sake of simplicity we will ignore that for now. Just remember if the wind is blowing (headwind) into you, it will take longer, and if it is blowing from behind (tailwind) it will take less time.

Now we have a basic flight plan to use.

Now if you don't have a chart, or you don't feel like doing all that work you can just use the flight simulator flight planner. Simply tell the flight planner where you want to start, where you want to go to, tell it to do a direct path, and it will spit out a path. Then check the navigation log and this will have the same information as what we just did. Let's see how my planning compares to the flight simulator planning. Everything looks good, although flight simulator says we should fly a heading of 66 degrees, which is close enough for our purposes.

Now that you have your flight plan you simply need to take off and climb to your cruising altitude. A note on cruising altitudes for VFR. When you fly west you fly at an even thousand plus 500 feet, when you fly an easterly heading you fly at an odd thousand plus 500 feet. For our flight we are flying east so 3500, 5500, 7500 and so on would be the proper altitudes to fly. Since the scenery here is nice and we don't have far to fly we will fly at 3,500. Now that we have climbed to our cruising altitude we turn back and fly directly over the airport we just left and turn to our heading. Be sure to check the time and remember when it was so that we know in about 17 minutes we will be at our arrival airport. Fly on the heading we chose and in about 15 minutes we will be close to our destination. That's all that's to it. There are many more factors you can involve such as wind correction, set heading points, additional waypoints which you can read up on at various sites on the internet.

VFR Downloads

There are tonnes of add-ons out there for the VFR pilots. In this article I will provide you with a "starter kit" for VFR flying and briefly describe the add-ons. In the future I plan to write reviews for new add-ons.

However, before I do that I must highly recommend the DreamFleet Archer for any pilot who really enjoys VFR flying. It's a great and detailed plane. You can get it at http://www.flight1.com or read the review here. You don't have to use payware to really enjoy VFR flying however, so here are a few aircraft you can get right here at flightsim.com.

 M

Aircraft

The Maule M-7 is the most popular FS2004 general aviation aircraft currently on FlightSim.Com, and for good reason. This aircraft was made with exceptional detail. The panel compares with many payware panels out there, and has detailed custom gauges. It comes in many different models all in one package, including amphibious, skiplane, taildragger, and tricycle models. It comes with detailed documentation as well as a full set of checklists and reference information.

The Lancair Legacy 2000 is a very exciting plane to fly. It is a small little single engine aircraft with a whole lot of power, 310 hp to be exact! It has a stall speed of only 58 kts with flaps extended and a never exceed speed of 274 kts! The model is one of the best looking for flight simulator yet, with excellent detail that really shows off how sleek and streamlined the aircraft is. It also has a custom panel and virtual cockpit with custom gauges. The flight dynamics are simply excellent; they really portray a powerful, unstable aircraft that just wants to go fast. This plane is simply a blast to fly. The Legacy has won the FlightSim.Com Developers award.

If you want to do aerobatics the Bellanca Super Decathlon is a great aircraft. It is easy to install, has a custom panel and gauges, and has great flight dynamics that make it perfect for aerobatic maneuvers. Installation is very easy due to an included setup program. The Super Decathlon also has won the FlightSim.Com Developers award.

Scenery

For scenery there is a lot to choose from. A great starter would be to download the entire Quebec Short Hops series by Leon Louis. This is a series of small airports made especially for VFR flying and is located along the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City.

For the Vancouver area Lars Hoeyer has made two very detailed packages for Port Alberni which is a city on Vancouver Island. He has made scenery for the new airport as well as the old one; they are both very detailed and are located in an area with great scenery including the Pacific coast to the west, as well as mountains and river valleys all around. These add-ons work great with the FSGenesis free Vancouver Island 38m mesh that you can get at http://www.fsgenesis.net in the free downloads section. Also I've made a small air harbor scenery located nearby, Bamfield Air Harbour which is for floatplanes only. It was my first scenery add-on so it just has a couple of buildings and a dock, but it's a nice place to drop by.

VFR Hardware

Need Charts? The easiest way to get a complete set of U.S. VFR charts is to purchase the Desktop Wings "VFR Atlas". This spiral bound atlas includes WAC charts (like sectionals, but on a smaller scale) for the entire U.S. plus larger, more detailed charts for all Class B airports. These are real (though outdated and thus no longer usable by real pilots) FAA charts conveniently bound together. More information can be found here

There are a lot of hardware items that can enhance the VFR experience.

I highly recommend that you pick up a set of charts for your favourite area, as well as an aviation protractor and chart ruler. This will really help you with navigation and add more realism to the experience.

An invaluable tool for any pilot is a flight computer. I have an E6-B which is one of the most popular. It's not an electric device as the name may suggest, but rather a metal slide rule that does an incredible amount of calculations. You can pick them up at pretty much any flying club or pilot hobby shop.

For computer hardware I highly recommend the CH Products Flightsim Yoke and Rudder Pedals. They cost quite a bit but they are well worth it if you have the money for them, especially if you want to get a pilot's license.

Conclusion

I hope you find this article educational and a good head start to VFR flying. In the next article I will include a lesson on airport operations and the circuit, as well as some reviews of new aircraft and scenery. I'll end this article with a little joke. If you ever get lost just follow this example...

Lost Cessna Pilot: "Big airport with a little Cessna 150 overhead, please identify yourself!"

For more check out this website... Funny Humor.com Aviation Jokes

David Voogd
davidvoogd@rogers.com