I have a question about IFR charts. Is it normal that only a few IFR airways are visible? The official FAA charts have a lot more airways. Makes it difficult planning IFR flights.
Gino
It looks exactly the same to me. I don’t see any airway missing by doing some random samples. Could you please highlight one airway that is missing in Navigraph Charts?
Kind regards,
Stephen
I think the “problem” is that it looks very different actually, even though indeed, the data appears to be the exact same AFAICT.
What I do find quite confusing about the NG view is the depiction of airway ident labels. Obviously, when you zoom out, the map gets very cramped and airway idents don’t really fit, but as you zoom in, I find whatever code is responsible for showing the labels is rather bad, in that it doesn’t show them even when there is plenty of room.
Please bear with me as I am thinking and writing somewhat concurrently.
Using as an example this screenshot:
The labels for V270 + V292, V1 and V16 + V3 are not showing when it would really make sense to see them.
You can see them when you move the map to the southwest:
What it looks like it’s happening is, your map merely has the labels at fixed locations on the map, and automatic show/hide of said labels, rather than being able to dynamically position the labels as required.
I guess it makes sense in that it’s much easier to implement, but does make the map harder to use (when the zoom is “high” you have to move the map around significantly to find some airway labels, but when the zoom is low there are so many fixes the labels get hidden, if you turn off fixes then the airways do show up but then you don’t have any fixes; basically, the map as currently implemented is very difficult to use for “old school” flight planning).
So I would say there is indeed room for improvement here; perhaps placing more airway labels so you can see the airways when the zoom is higher, and/or giving more precedence to airway labels at lower zoom levels where they may actually be more useful than fix idents.
I’m not sure how “real-world” aviation apps work, but my instinct tells me your map does actually give too much importance to fixes when enabled, for example, IFR low with default settings:
That looks hardly usable for anything, IMO.
IFR high of the same map area is a little better:
But still, I would think there are still too many fixes, where airway idents would make much more sense at that zoom level? Possibly, at that kind of zoom level (and even maybe generally), fixes should have one of the lowest priority of anything the map can show?
Regards,
Tim
Thanks pointing me out that all airways are there. Playing with the settings, less waypoints, changing the zoom level made me more comfortable with the map. Sort off spatial disorientation.
Happy holidays
Gino