DO YOU NEED WAAS FOR LNAV VNAV DRIVER

GPS was long ago supposed to have supplanted terrestrial-based navigation but we are only now getting to the point where we can see that day. Its just that it has taken longer to get here than the FAA said it would. Ironically, the promised capabilities are actually materializing and, in some cases, being exceeded. The word rarely does imply a degree of doubt, however, so its worth asking and answering these questions: if you buy WAAS now, what do you get out of the deal? How about in two, three or five years? Asked another way, is there any harm in waiting it out for awhile? Answer: it depends, but probably not.Īs with every other high-dollar government program, GPS-and especially WAAS-was over promised. But the Cherokee owner will rarely be prevented from going somewhere IFR for his lack of WAAS-capable GPS and that truth may endure for several more years.

DO YOU NEED WAAS FOR LNAV VNAV DRIVER

The owner of a cutting-edge panel can fly into a few more outlying airports than the Cherokee driver can and he enjoys a measure of additional safety thanks to the superior accuracy of GPS. The reality is that for now, a skinflint owner in a Cherokee equipped with a couple of KX-170s and a Garmin 195 can do 80 or 90 percent of the IFR operations that the well-heeled owner of a cabin class twin equipped with dual color mapcomms can. While its true that WAAS can be called revolutionary technology, its also true that its impact on flying IFR is likely to be evolutionary for quite some time to come. But that doesnt mean every owner should rush right out and buy a WAAS box. So thats got to be better yet, right?ĭefinitely. Last July, the agency officially turned on the Wide Area Augmentation System that makes GPS more accurate and more reliable and opens up the vast majority of backwoods airports to IFR navigation, including precision approaches. When the FAA first rolled out GPS approaches in 1994-yes, it has been nearly a decade-we thought that to be a good thing.

Do you need waas for lnav vnav