Heading?

[hal100]

Hello

 

I get the feeling that I'm being unbelievably dense but can anyone tell me how I find out my heading please? I load a flight plan into FMS but don't know if it sets my heading for me or if I have to manually put the heading in. I also keep checking the local map to see which way I am going but as it is small I am not sure I am getting it right. I can't see anything to do with the heading on the FMS.

 

Can anyone please tell me what I'm doing wrong. I will keep googling and try to figure it out myself but have been trying to do this for weeks now lol.

 

Thanks in advance

[SwissCyul]

First of all: 

-Which aircraft are you flying with?

-Did you ever program a FMS before? 

[hal100]

Hi

I have been trying to fly several planes. I get the flight plan into the fms okay but keep going off route as i don't know where to find heading or if i have to figure it out myself. Its ok if the plane has the garmin and i follow the map but if it doesn't i get lost.

[eMko]

Well, looks like there should be much longer answer than it's possible to write in one post.

 

There are several methods of navigation either real world or in a game. If you are at some point and want to see which heading you need to go somewhere else, you can use software like Plan-G (http://www.tasoftware.co.uk/). This can be connected with X-Plane and it can show your position on the map. You then click somewhere with right mouse button and select "Get go-to heading" from the pop-up menu - it will tell you the heading, distance and time needed to go to that point. You can also create a flight plan there.

 

Do you have an access to the .org forum? If so, you can check the X-PPL topic (http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showforum=90 the very basics of flying and navigation are written in very short yet readable articles. Really, it's a good thing to go through  all of them.

 

Also if you wan an extensive source of information about navigating, you can go to the http://www.navfltsm.addr.com/index.htm . It's quite an old-looking site (dating back to the age of MS Flight Simulator 1998), but still perfectly valid.

 

After that, you can read some documentation about autopilots and the new GPS introduced in X-Plane 10.30. It's not a good idea not to understand navigation enough (so you have to ask "where I can find a heading") and start using GPS or FMS.

 

The new X-Plane GPS is quite a "new" gadget for X-Plane and I haven't seen extensive documentation about that, but the real world documentation/youtube tutorials will do the job (just have in mind that SIDs and STARs are not implemented in X-Plane and it's generally illegal to just throw the points to the GPS (for various but quite good reasons) - of course, this is a game, so ... who cares ... ;-) ).

 

The X-Plane default FMS should show you desired heading to some point but ... it's a very basic "better than nothing" instrument. IMHO not worth using nowadays - you can find a plenty of planes with better systems - e.g. look at Carenado airplanes (http://www.carenado.com/CarSite/Portal/index.php).

Edited December 16, 2014 by eMko