Complete Guide to LittleNavMap - the best free flight planning software for Flight Simulator

hello so it's been a while since we looked at little navmap in a video and little nav map has changed quite a lot so I'm looking here at the latest beta which is all beta depending on which part of the world you're from which is version 2.8.1 and we're going to start from scratch as if we've never used it before so if you have just installed this on Earth Map you won't even see any of this data on the map if we can we can simulate that quite easily just by doing that I've got the simulator running which is why you can see a yellow airplane down here um when you start out of the box you won't see anything on the map so on the first install it will actually prompt you for this but if you have skipped past that all you need to do is to go into the scenery Library menu and load the scenery library and that will pop open this dialog it knows automatically where flight simulator is and you can just click on load and it you can see the data here of what it loaded the last time I did it so it loads basically all of the airports the vors the ils's ndbs markers everything you might want all the airspaces as well and puts them on the map basically so if we close out that it takes a few minutes to do it and it's worth pointing out actually if you go and add some new Custom Scenery to flight simulator as long as that scenery isn't um encrypted in any way then if you go and reload your scenery Library then you will be able to see it so if you've downloaded scenery from flightsim.to for example then it will be there on your your map if you reload your scenery Library okay so once you've loaded your scenery you will suddenly see a load of information appearing on the map and I'm going to switch some of these things on I'll come back to this later with what this all does okay so what you get so when you zoom in you can suddenly see the map becomes more populous as you get further zoomed in I'm using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out by the way so you can see I'm sat here at an airport if I keep zooming in I'll actually see the outline of the airport yeah and the the parking and The Parking Spot numbers so you can keep zooming in and zooming out with the mouse and it does all that nicely for you and it you know provides more information the more you zoom in and out so what is little nav map actually for well while we're flying along in the simulator that yellow airplane will move yeah and it will actually draw a dotted line behind it so you can track where you've been and where you're going but beyond that this is a fantastic planning application so what we can do we'll do this for a VFR flight to begin with so visual flight rules we're going to right click on an Airfield we're going to on the context menu that pops up we're going to say set that airport as our departure Airport and then we're going to say okay we'll go to fly via the Compton VOR over here so we'll right click on that VOR and we'll add that to our flight plan and then we'll go over to uh say kidlington so we'll right click on kidlington and add that to our flight plan you can see by saying add it's figured out actually that was closer to the middle of this route than it was to sticking on the end so it's put it in the middle so I can press Ctrl Z which does Undo which you can also get to up here on the toolbar but like instead of doing add to my flight plan I can append it so append it puts it on the end of my flight plan so if I go and right click on kidlington and append onto my flight plan it puts on the end okay so some some things to notice straight away look along the lines of the flight plan it's showing you the distances and the bearings or headings to fly I should say so you can see distance and course along each leg of the flight plan beyond that you can actually see more if we come in here and look at this data while we were adding bits to the flight plan it was building this list up so we're leaving Wickham we're flying by Compton going to kidlington and you can see data you can configure what data is shown by opening this dialogue out on the little Cog menu on the flight plan and you can say okay for a VFR flight all I really want to see is leg time and remaining nautical miles and I can say okay and it gives you that you know the basics to know how far you've got to go um and that's kind of that's as far as a lot of people ever take little on that map if they're just flying around and having fun but beyond that you can get into right clicking on your airplane and while you're in flight for example you might want to do some measuring of things so you can measure the distance and then you get the mouse and you can just draw on the map so wherever I click the left Mouse button down there we'll actually leave that there and that line is stuck there on the map to get rid of that line I can go and right click on that plus mark and I can remove the measurement okay by the same token we can right click anywhere on the map and we can add range rings so if we do that it asks us what range Wings range Rings we want so we might want one at 10 miles 150 miles and 100 miles for example and then we can say okay and then we get our range rings okay you can right click on the Range rings and you can remove the range rings by the same way okay so you can imagine very quickly that's how you could make a VFR flight plan if you notice well we were putting these waypoints down it was busy drawing this plot underneath as well of the the ground underneath our flight plan so you can see there's the the top of climb they're just getting to competent there's a top of descent and there's this landing at Oxford so how on Earth did it figure the same how long how did it know that our airplane was going to take that long so if you notice at the top of the screen it says Cessna c172 Skyhawk that refers to the aircraft menu and aircraft performance files now you can download these from the little navmap website so if you just Google little enough map Performance you'll find the link to it so if I open an aircraft performance file you can see I've got a number of them in my file system so I've just gone for the Cessna 172 Skyhawk performance file I've renamed all of these by the way so I can open it and that's all well and good it says oh there's a problem here because I'm actually in a one five two on the ground in a simulator look user aircraft type 152 is not equal to Skyhawk but it's good enough for us for the moment but what we can do instead of relying on whatever files we can find we can go in the aircraft menu and we can make a new aircraft performance yeah and once you've made a new one you can actually come in and edit all the data so you can edit the performance data of the airplane of its climb rate and climb speed that kind of thing descent rate descent speed enough for it to be able to figure this out also the the fuel burn rate during the different phases of flight so it can calculate if you can carry enough fuel to make the journey you're wanting to so that's all well and good but that might be quite difficult to find that data out so actually little navmap has a trick up its sleeve because if you think about it there's this airplane you can see where you are and it can track the data from the simulator about the airplane so what you can actually do is in the aircraft menu you can restart aircraft performance collection it turns out the entire time little navmap is running it is actually collecting data on the airplane that you have selected so what you can do is restart performance collection which zeros everything go and do a flight in whatever airplane you want and then merge that performance data into whatever profile you have loaded so it will use the data that it has seen about the airplane to figure out how much fuel it burns in climb in descent and in Cruise how fast it is and all that kind of thing so it's a bit better actually than having the textbook data because then the performance data is actually the way you fly the airplane so you're going to get accurate numbers based on the way you typically operate the airplane rather than a test Pilot's logbook you know with flying things absolutely by the book so anyway so that's aircraft performance and that is what gives it this data to be able to plot but beyond that yeah this um the plot underneath you is really really handy especially if you're going somewhere mention this like the Alps or the Pyrenees or anywhere like that okay so that's how you can track flights and you can fly along them and that's all well and good what about seeing other people if you click at the top of the screen up here there's online clients so I'm going to go and click on it and you can see a load of little red airplanes have just sprung up all over the place little clusters of them where friends have gone out flying I guess together so this is actually reading some data and I'll get to what it does in a minute this is going to update every five seconds because that's what I've told it to do and you can see these people are flying along having all their fun so if we can click on one of them or just hover over one you'll notice when you hover over anything you get a pop-up dialogue telling you about it yeah there's actually two planes down there so it Stacks them up if you you know if they're very close together if we Zoom right in we can see both of them look whoops they've moved before we could see them so yeah if you click on one of the airplanes it obviously it shows it in a dialogue over here so that's how you can see online clients we'll get back to how you can figure that in a minute so before we go any further you kind of seen the basics of weakened program flights and we can see lots and lots of information around the screen let's go and remove all of these dialogues and kind of Ruin little navmap and bring it right back down to Basics so get rid of everything and we'll build it up a bit of time so you get to see what I'm doing so I'm going to say a new Flight Plan in the file menu so I'll say don't save the changes so we've got nothing in here now yep so we go file I did new Flight Plan and we've got rid of everything okay so in the window menu are all the various pieces of the um the interface that you just saw that we could play with if we pull if we click on each of these pieces they will reappear and we can move them around so if we say I want the flat plate we'll do search first we'll do them in order search and that pops open the search dialog so you will notice a lot of these dialogues have tabs in them because there's a lot of functionality hidden inside them so search can search airports navades procedures user points user points are just where you've put up in the map yourself yeah and you can see you can import them so I've imported a CSV here of user points we'll come back to that though the logbook so as you fly around you can have it record your flights in the logbook the online clients those are the people you saw the little red airplanes and that will update every five seconds online centers if you're connected to that SIM for example that will show you all of the centers that are online again we'll come back to that and online servers we don't need to worry about that okay so say we were going to do a search for an airport we can either go by the icao code for the airport so that would be Stansted and you can see a yellow circle appeared on the map if we double click on stance did it goes straight to it uh we could go for KSFO for San Francisco International for example if we double click on that it goes straight to it and if we zoom out we can obviously see the San Francisco Bay by the same token you can look for navades so you can put CPT for Compton which is the VOR in the center of the UK you can search for things by name as well so I could put in a London City and it's found at eglc so there's London City Airport so you can see very quickly you can be searching for all sorts of things so airports no AIDS procedures and so on so we'll come back to looking at IFR procedures in a minute so you know Sid stars that kind of thing okay so you can see when we were clicking on things this popped up to show information we'll come back to that so we've seen the search so far if we go back to that window menu we can open flight planning which is just this one part of this so we've got the remarks so we could write some text in here if we if we have written text it will appear in here so if we were to go and put a flight plan in so say we went from London city so we set it as our destination so it is a departure and we choose a Runway when you choose a a Runway with options notice you get the option to choose a Runway so if we just set the airport as departure it won't ask if we select a Runway it will ask so if we say select London begin as a departure it notices it didn't ask if we right click and say select Runway and use London City it will ask so that's a departure from the old version of little nav map it didn't used to have that option at all so we could say that and we'll say we're going to leave on um let's do it again so right click and select Runway and use London city as the departure point and say okay you can see and it's put in because we left on that Runway it's put in a little bit of flight map out to the the climate basically away from the runway on Runway zero nine there notice when you hover over an airport you don't just get the information on the airport you also get the ILS oops it's a bit fiddly with the mouse you get the airport information you also get the ILS information for the runways which is really handy notice on the airport information you also get the Metar readout for the weather so a common mistake people make in little navmap is they see this yellow wind arrow with a direction and a speed up here and they think that's the speed where they're looking it's not that is the speed the airplane that's connected you know the simulator the airplane in the simulator is experiencing um okay so yeah if we go and quickly put in a piece of root so this can make some sense so you can see we put in our destination there or to departure airport we'll put in a destination over here so we'll right click on the airport set it as our destination it's worth pointing out if you put in a different airport over here so say we put in eggw you can right click here as well and you get the same menu yeah as long as it's an airport it doesn't matter if it's on the map or in a dialogue somewhere yeah so you can come over here right click on an airport and it shows the same context relative menu Okay so we've got a little bit of Flight Plan there now so we can go in here and we can type some remarks so if we were going to save this and we wanted to write some notes then we can go and write them in the remarks okay fuel report remember we said that the performance data included how much fuel the aircraft burnt at each phase of its flight therefore you can get a really accurate fuel report so it even estimates down to the the taxi Act of the runway yeah so you've got taxi fuel there contingency fuel climate descent it's it's all very very clever and it also factors in the Wind so it's it's doing the wind on Route and using NOAA data to do that and again that can be configured we'll see that in a few minutes Okay so this flight planning window then has several tabs it has the remarks the legs of the plan notice if you click on the legs it puts a green arrow on on on the plan and if you double click on a piece of the the list it will go to it on the map for you yeah so then if we use the mouse wheel you can zoom back out uh beyond that we've got the fuel report we've got the current performance so it's on the ground once you've started flying you would start to see this fill up with data and you would see for example the fuel burn rate and things like that speed you're traveling at and so on and so forth okay so that was the flight planning window if you pull up the information window it you could already see it there it's worth pointing out all of these windows can be dragged and they are what's called dockable yeah so that means you can actually move them around the screen and drag them towards the edges and they will try and intelligently snap into place so if I pull this one down into this corner and let go it will snap into that corner if I wanted flight planning somewhere else say down here underneath everything I could if I wanted to it really doesn't mind where you put things but you tend to find most people put the flight plan up at the top left information bottom left map in the middle and search on the right so the information page gives you a static way of keeping something on the screen that instead of relying on hovering over it to see it so if you right click on something you can always do show information and that could either be the airport or a specific ILS or something like that so if we go and click on Luton Airport you see there's the information but notice we have more than just this overview I mean there's a lot on that over here you've got the the you know the current weather longest runway so this is like summary information you've also got elevation which is really useful but you've also got data on each Runway you've got all the com frequencies all of the procedures all of the nearest airfields to Luton and the nearest Radio navigates to Luton and if you keep scrolling across we've also got a summary of the weather yeah so rather than trying to pick apart the NOAA meta weather readout text you can actually go and see like a sanitized version of it in here where it's been made much easier to read okay so also in the information page you have navigate information so if you were to go and click on a given um navade so say this Barclay one you it will pop over to the navade tab and show you all the breakdown of information about that particular nav Aid you can also do air spaces now to make air spaces work we're going to have to jump a little bit and show you something else so there's some icons on the toolbar up here these are air spaces yeah so we can say we want all of them shown please and the airspaces appear on the map notice you could pick and choose what you want to see but then if you go and click on an airspace with the mouse it shows you the name of the airspace and the details about it like Min and Max altitude and so on and so forth so you could again you could click on a different one you can see there's the London TMA airspace okay I'm going to turn the airspaces back off for the moment we'll come back to that you've got a fuel report so this is your fuel burn down during your flight oh sorry that's I've jumped across again haven't I got user points we haven't actually got any user points showing up so I'm not going to get too much into user points they're up here on the toolbar they're the little star I can say show me all of them please and you can see Suddenly It's all I've got a downloaded CSV if we go and look in the user points um it's up here I think somewhere user points you can import them in various formats if you go to flightsim.2 you'll find that you can download a CSV of all of the um the custom buildings and features in flight simulator in the stock scenery which is exactly what I've downloaded so I've got the CSV telling me where all of the points of interest are that have been built custom yeah so if I go and click on one of those it tells me about it and it tells me the exact location so that's what the user points are you can make your own if you right click on the map somewhere you can actually go to user points and you can add your own user points so you could compile your own file of user points and again knowing that they are just CSV files if you've got a database somewhere else that's got longitude latitude and description yeah then you can go crazy for it and go go make it okay uh there's a logbook as well so we're not going to get into that you need to have flown flights for the logbook to be populated obviously it's going to show you details about the flight that you did okay so that's the information screen if we come further down so we've looked at search flight planning and information we've got the flight plan elevation profile we saw this earlier it's very clever and it breaks it down into the waypoints so if we were to go and say add some more to this route so we'll go over to here set that as our destination and we'll go via a VOR over here and add that to our flight plan and we'll put another one in here and add that one to our flight plan so we're putting a plan in flying via various vors now look what's happened here it's actually put them in the elevation plot over the ground just to give you a really good reference and as of the new beta as well it's giving us the distance measurements between them as well although it also draws it on the line it draws it in this elevation plot as well but obviously the elevation plot really comes into its own if you are flying somewhere in the mountains so just to illustrate that if we go over to um the Alps on the edge of Italy so let's go and do a new flight plan just for example's sake we'll set off from this airport here and we will visit Lucano and then we'll visit or go and land then in um sandrio so look at that so this is really where the map itself comes into its own is working in in tandem with the elevation profile notice we are using little street map at the moment sorry open street map not little street map we're using openstreetmap which doesn't really give you elevation data we can switch that over and use open topo map and suddenly we can see the Hills and the more we zoom in the more you see like all the contour lines and everything so remember this is showing the elevation plot directly underneath the line so what if we right click here and add a custom position to the flight plan notice it's chopping this down so we'll change this as well we'll see we're actually going to fly our route at 5000 feet so as soon as we've done that this lifted in the air to 5000 feet so we might want to say okay we'll add another position there and suddenly you can make sure that you're flying high enough so yeah maybe we go to 7500 feet then and suddenly we're not in trouble of going through these Hills I mean obviously this wasn't a very high route anyway but if we go and add positions to the flight plan just to stay in the valleys you can see very quickly you can minimize your risk of being too near the ground and notice it's highlighting a thousand feet over the ground at any high points of you know places we need to steer clear of so obviously on that on the way in there we have got some hills notice as we move the mouse along as well on the elevation plot a circle moves on the map to give you reference as to where that is so there's a hill just here look that we're not clearing so all we need to do is put in some custom positions to go through that Valley there's a bit of a dog leg through the valley there at Sandra there you go it's completely flattened it out look we've avoided it so obviously these big Hills here are in our way so we're flying over them but we could go crazy and you know follow the the water all the way around if we really wanted to so just to for argument's sake let's do it position there and we'll fly all the way out to here add position and over here out of position now I was hoping that would happen remember we saw earlier that a a point could go into the wrong place so we got Waypoint number four so I've highlighted it on the list I'm going to hold the control key down on the keyboard and use the up and down arrows to resequence it so if I hold Ctrl on and press down I am moving that leg further up or down the list which is you know resequencing it amongst the other waypoints so suddenly we can say add position and position it's a crazy flight plan but you can see we've completely got rid of the hills from directly underneath of us by zigzagging around all over the place we could do another one if we wanted to be mad about this at Waypoint add position or we can add waypoints look if there are if there are any nearby yeah so you can see very quickly so we could actually fly the whole route now at 5000 feet if we fly all over the place so we can recalculate that but can we stay just above the warnings so you can see really quickly you can make some really quite complicated plans so the huge advantage of the all of this is it the plan doesn't just live inside of little navmap you can go to the file menu and notice you can export the flight plan as a pln file so then you can load that into an aircraft in flight simulator and all of those custom waypoints will be pre-programmed in so you could hit you know or you'll first of all you will see that flight plan if you've got a glass cockpit in your aircraft and secondly if you've got nav mode and GPS mode enabled in the aircraft the plane will follow all of those custom waypoints all on its own okay so we were really talking about the elevation plot there but you can see much more of a representative idea here of what it does yeah so you get the the height of the ground underneath your plot line on the map so you saw very briefly that we were able to change the map and we had lots and lots of options I've got some custom ones installed so there will be some here that you may not have so for example I can show the Google Maps terrain view which is is the usual one I use it's a custom one if you just Google it Google Maps terrain little nav map you'll find the add-on for it okay so what else shall we look at let's go into the window menu and Carry On Down simulate aircraft again that was the dialogue we could already see over there so we pop it back up so that's telling us all about our aircraft yeah it's showing us where it is in the world and speed and so on the progress tab is interesting this comes alive if you're actually flying there's obviously it doesn't have much to say while we're sat here on the ground but the the progress tab would show you show us that's a good point actually if I hold control on and roll the mouse wheel I can make the wording bigger or smaller um yeah this will obviously give you all of your data about the aircraft in flight which is quite useful um there's also AI multiplayer so if you've got AI aircraft showing up then they will show up if I go and click the online thing over here and we pull up search there's something that's worth looking at in search if we scroll over to the right while we're in search we can see the online clients so that's a list of everybody that's appearing on the map Okay so we've gone through the major windows and and some other side subjects as well notice there are many toolbars as well they are all on by default and you can see them all clustered up here with lines in between where each toolbar begins and ends so you can see you can move those chunks of toolbar around so you could customize it to the nth degree to have exactly how you want with Windows in particular places and toolbars in particular places and that's where the window menu also comes in where you can save the layout yeah if you muddle it up completely and you don't like what you've done so say I've put this over here and I can't figure out how this works anymore and oh what have I done and it's bust it and oh and this is completely unusable you can go to the window menu and you can receive reset everything back to the way it was so reset window layout to default and it just fixes it for you okay so you're never in a position where it's going to be completely broken you can always reset back to default and then if once you've got it how you want it you can save the layout as a file and reload it when you need it a common one to do is to switch everything off and save one as minimal we've just got the map okay so before we go much further let's just have a quick look through these tools across the tool tab so you've got a new flight plan so if I click that and it says do I want to save what I've done and I'll say no so that's the new flight plan you can open a flight plan from the disk so if I open a flight plan I've got one saved if I double click on it there's the flight plan it's going to be a group flight I'm doing soon so there you go you can load flight plans obviously I can save that flight plan I can do a save as and I can I can export it actually as other formats yeah so I can do flight Sim p3d X-Plane flight gear and there's very other export flight plan to other formats and there's even more in there like V pilot xivap IV AP GPX and so on and so forth so yeah you can save your flight plan basically if you look here it says reset the flight plan aircraft Trail and more for a new flight the reason for that is while you're flying along it leaves a dotted line behind your airplane a bit like in an old movie scene and that stays on the map until you get rid of it and there's two ways of getting rid of it you can either come in here go to Flight Plan and uh sorry go to map and remove all of the the trails and everything so you can see delete aircraft Trail is there there isn't one at the moment that's why it's not lit up so you can do all of that via the menus in the flight plan and the map menu but that one button up there will go straight back to as if you're doing a new a new plan so it tells you you know what do you want to actually get rid of and we'll just say everything yeah get rid of everything so we're back to a blank slate because while you're flying you might be drawing those distance measurements and rings and all kinds of stuff you might even draw Holdings which is something we'll get to okay you can go to the home view so if you click on that it goes back out and zooms out you can go to the center Mark for distance search so you can see I have set a center Mark you set a center Mark by right clicking somewhere and go to more and you can set the center this is really useful if you're saying okay I want to do a flight but I only want to fly about four or five hundred miles based on how long I've got to do it so you can go in the search go to airports and you can do a distance search so notice there's a check box here so I can fly it from um where the distance search center is so remember I right clicked that to do it and I said more and set Center so from that Center I can say find me anywhere within those bounds if I remove that Ico code all its found look is airports and it showed me the distance that I might fly to so if I right click on that one it's rugen so I'll set that as my destination and if I set Heathrow as my departure so I right click on Heathrow set that as my departure and then you can see a 528 mile route so that's what that distance search does okay so let's carry on across the the dialog up here so Center the flight plan now we have a flight plan that actually works um keep the user aircraft centered so while this is highlighted notice it lights up and stays lit up that will keep our aircraft in the simulator in the middle of the screen basically we do get to drag away from it but after 10 seconds it will snap back to it okay so if we we can clear all the highlights on the map so if we've gone and highlighted anything that will that will get rid of it for us um just working my way across here go back to the last map position go forwards to the next so if you've been zooming around looking at different places this does actually remember where you've been looking which is really useful as well you can select the detail map to draw on the map so the sorry detail level to draw on the map so you can slide this up and make it less or more cluttered so there's normal and again you can use the mouse wheel as well on that okay you saw in the world you can choose the the tiling basically for the map in the background so if we go back to open street map you'll see the default one that comes out of the box Okay so after that you get the option to choose the airports and various navigation features available so let's go and turn everything off and turn them back on one by one so we'll say none of those none of that none of that none of that uh no airplane so nothing is lit up now so these are the major airports yeah and again it's it's according to what's in here so we could say we want just the hard surface ones or not you can toggle them basically you could say a runway length limit I only want wrong ways out over 4 000 feet for example or you could say get rid of that limit entirely so you can tune how many airports are appearing on the map for you and that's tied to zoom distance as well so the further we go out the smaller airfields disappear okay so you can turn on the radio navigation Edge so the VOR beacons and Vortex things like that will all appear all over the map uh ndbs fixes or waypoints notice as you zoom in they get names obviously you can then click on them and it shows you the information on it anyway um feathers for ILS so again as you zoom in on ILS it tells you all the information about it but if you click on it anyway it tells you it again in the dialog there and if you hover over it the pop-up shows you all the information uh I think this is the GLS approach pass so yeah they're not as common so ILS is going to be the one you use the most so if there are any Holdings if we go back to London we'll see the Holdings so any established Holdings that are you know Common will be drawn onto the map for you so you've got a good reference of where they are well while we're looking at that we'll also look at something else so I'll get rid of the Holdings so it's not too busy on the map and we're going to look at Wickham because there's a small Airfield and it's easy to do this with if we right click on Wickham we can add the traffic pattern to Wickham and we can specify what we want the traffic pattern to look like so we might want the runway 24 traffic pattern doing left turns with one mile base leg one mile downwind at say 2 30 or 2000 feet for example or you can choose the line color as well and you can have the entry and exit indicators and we go okay and it draws you the traffic pattern okay if you want to remove that traffic pattern off the map you just right click on the small circle at the start of the traffic pattern and then you can remove the traffic pattern you can do Holdings yourself in exactly the same way so if you want to draw a holding you can add a holding and again it will ask you for the parameters of the hold if we just say okay it will draw it with whatever the parameters were that were on the screen there so it's obviously saying yeah 225 degrees 45 degrees and the one minute hold so if you right click and we can remove the holding okay so that holding took us to go and look at circuits so that's all good you get the MSA sectors which you can show I don't think that will really apply here no it kind of does so if you go and zoom in down here you can see them yep you get Victor Airways this is the low altitude Airways yeah so you can see them so when you're planning a flight in the big jets that comes in really useful obviously you can change all the size of the text and everything behind the scenes I'll show you how to do that in a few minutes you get the Jet Airways the High Altitude Airways so you can see the map becomes a giant mess when you're looking at them so while we're looking at Jet Airways you can see there's another one here there's the tracks if we zoom out they're not drawn on by default and the reason for that is they change all the time so if we go to flight plan we can download the oceanic tracks give it a second and there they are so it gets the current tracks being flown across the ocean based on the weather basically because that's why they change so often because of the weather so planes flying across the ocean will be following these tracks and that means that that button there becomes active and we can turn the tracks on and off and again being able to download the tracks is new in this version of little nav map so we will delete the oceanic track so they're not actually there now okay so next up we've got user features so we can switch on and off whether any of this stuff appears like range Rings measurement lines traffic patterns by default they're all on if we say none they'll all disappear and we won't get the option to draw them either so if you go and right click and you think well I can't draw a measurement line why it's because you've said none in here yeah yeah so user points we saw you can create user points obviously there's lots of types of user point you could choose so you can switch on particular types of user point or just say all now in my database I've got I've just got the um the points of interest like for example this building here Cologne Cathedral for example um we'll turn that back to none for the moment the yellow line is the flight plan that we've made missed approaches do we want to show them or not it's on by default notice these ones stay on or off so if we we were flying towards rugen that doesn't have a missed approach but we'll come back to missed approaches we'll leave it on because I'll do an IFR flight plan in a minute to show you how SIDS and stars work if you want to show your airplane that's the yellow icon and you will notice now there is a yellow airplane sat there in that Wickham if you want to show a dotted line behind you as you're flying that's the next icon and that will leave a little dotted Trail as I fly along through the sky you can show a compass notice as well that oh it's not in this dialogue you can actually detach that compass from the aircraft and I can't remember where that is for the life of me but I'm going to move on for the moment because it's something you'd very rarely do you can show AI aircraft and that's the orange aircraft so that's a plane being drawn by the simulator yeah there's another one there notice they are separate from the online aircraft now so that's something that's changed in the beta that used to be one option in the older versions a little enough map so you can now separate that out and have the online and AI as two separate things you can show boats or not or other vehicles I should say so yeah multiplayer ship position and data on the map so obviously if we do that I haven't actually got any at the moment so that's fine so you can show a map grid so you can have the longitude latitude grid on your map country and city names again that only applies to certain Maps it doesn't to this one therefore it's not there the minimum altitudes around the world yep so it's giving you your minimum safe Cruise altitudes and I think if we hover over that yeah show minimum off Route altitude m-o-r-a uh show the airport sorry the show the airport weather icons so if we go and zoom in is it going to give us anything much to talk of not really the one that's really of interest to us is this one we can find the wind at the ground for example if we zoom in there we go so that's the wind direction done speed foreign so we can choose at Cruise altitude we can also choose wind for a selected altitude so if we wanted to know what the wind is that's at say 30 000 feet there you go so if you are doing a long route like a transatlantic route or something that becomes very useful to you and you might end up rerouting based on that data and that you can choose where that data comes from I'll show you where to do that in a moment so I'm going to say no we don't want to see any wind at the moment that's fine and you can have Sun shading on the globe so there you go it's drawing the sun onto the the representation of the Earth okay if you look back in here you can have spherical or Mercator Projection so if you want to draw the Earth as a globe you can it's a lot slower if you want to draw it normally you can and again turning the the light projection off speeds up the drawing as well okay so before we go and deep dive into the menus looking at the bits and pieces there let's go and do a a plan that we might do for a Jet Plane so we're gonna go and do a a new Flight Plan we're not going to bother saving anything we're going to go to aircraft performance and open the aircraft performance of a 737 for example it's going to complain because I'm actually an assessner but that's not going to stop us from actually putting a flight plan in so let's pretend we're going to fly from Heathrow so we'll right click set Heathrow as our departure and then we'll zoom out and we'll go and fly to let's fight somewhere interesting maybe just get rid of that dialogue maybe nice and set nice as the destination okay so you can see there's that altitude plot and we could say okay this is an IFR flight and we're going to fly it at say 30 000 feet So based on the the 737 performance it's worked out our climate and descent so this is where little nav map really gets interesting and really kind of starts to meet the likes of navigraph if you right click on the airport we can say show us the departure procedures for Heathrow so we can say these are the SIDS the standard instrument departures so based on the Wind we could say okay we're going to be leaving on Runway two seven right for example and when we zoom out we can see the standard instrument departure we've just highlighted on the list superimposed onto the map and we can go and flick through the different SIDS and say we want that one for example the debt 2f departure we can right click on it and we can insert it into our flight plan so if you've never seen SIDS and stars before a sid is basically a a sequence of waypoints potentially with um restricted speeds and altitudes at each of the waypoints as well so if we insert that Sid it puts it into our flight plan and then carries on along its way where it becomes interesting is if we look in here so we go and click on that Cog menu again and we go and remove the data we did have let's ask for the procedure the airway and the restriction and say okay so it's doing that you can see look it at that Waypoint and when we click on it remember we get the little green circle appears at that Waypoint we need to be above 590 feet indicative sorry um above sea level sorry at the Epsom Waypoint we need to be above 4000 feet by the time we get there we need to be at six thousand feet until we get to detling yeah and then you can begin your cruise so these are the real world standard instrument departures there's something I should get into before we go much further with talking about that is when we were looking at the scenery Library menu earlier you saw that there was an option if you've got multiple simulators installed you can see I no longer have X-Plane installed but I've got flight Sim selected here and notice it also says navigraph if you've got another graph little nav map can use its data so you can and you can choose you don't have to you can say use another graph for navades and procedures yeah and it will integrate it directly in and use its database as well as the flights and data okay so we put a standard instrument departure in so what about if we want to go to nice then how are we going to arrive at nice so if we right click we can say show the arrival procedures for nice and notice they are split into the Stars the standard approach routes and the approaches so that's basically like the ILS so if we go and hover over this we can see the weather and there's the NOAA station meta report there the wind is 320 degrees seven knots so it's coming in from this way so we probably need to land Runway 2-2 so if we were going to say okay let's look at the ILS is there an ILS no there isn't there's any feathers for Runway four look so it would have to be an Arnav into Romi 22 and we can look at the various options and see uh where's a good one that's a good one so we'll right click that and we'll insert that our nav approach in yeah notice it is also drawn and this is why I I was said I was going to come back to this there's the um a missed approach procedures it's also drawn the missed approach procedure because that's part of this approach yeah is if you're not going to make it you turn off and you go into a holding pattern up here and it's all got all the instructions to do it so beyond that approach what is the standard approach route to get to that approach so let's go and have a look at them and again we can zoom out and we can have a look at them on the map and see which ones make sense so we're trying to get to nanax remember so we could come in here so that probably does make sense doesn't it that one we could come in there fly around and if we if we did miss it we basically come back to this point so you'll see what I mean in a moment if we right click and insert that for 22 was it 22 left we were aiming for we can see it over here can't we yes 22 left and say okay notice yeah it joins it up look at the end of the star there's the yellow line that carries on across to the beginning of the approach obviously if you miss it you come back out here enter a holding pattern and then get back onto the approach again okay so that's kind of done the standard instrument departure and the star for an instrument root but what about all this part in the middle you can either do it by hand so you could pull up the Jet Airways for example and you could say oh actually I'd like to you know get on this one at Sandy and fly along and do and you could figure it all out yourself which is a great academic exercise but you don't actually have to what you can do there's an icon up here on the toolbar shows you the flight plan calculation window so if we pop that open we'll say calculate from departure to destination using the Jet Airways cruising altitude for the calculation we're going to fly at 35 or 30 000 feet and we are going to yeah that's fine we can just leave everything as it is and we can calculate and it's done all of the routings for us via the Jet Airways so if we go and superimpose that back over now you can see look it's got onto these various corridors through the sky and followed them at the appropriate altitudes for us right the way across the sky and it's done it far more quickly than we could have done it obviously in the real world you would have this given to you but this is the tool that you can make a flight plan with yeah so this is the same thing simbrief would do behind the scenes is go and work all this out for you so little nav map can do exactly the same trick notice in the file menu you can open a flight plan from simbrief name and you can export it to sim brief that's new in the beta of little navmap yeah that wasn't there before you can also show the flight plan in Sky vector so it's it's it's very cool Okay so we've got obviously a lot going on here now but the the interesting thing for us to look at for an instrument flight route is these Airways are now filled in automatically so along this like 850 here you've actually got three or four waypoints along that route so if we can shift-click them you'll see them all circled here obviously we can declutter this by turning off the Airways and having a look we could turn off the other airplanes so we can concentrate on what we're doing and you can see all of that being drawn on this elevation plot notice this shows you also those restrictions so if we make this bigger and we go and scroll across you can see those altitude restrictions and if we scroll down to the other end you'll see the approach into and again we can use the mouse to zoom you can see the approach in yeah so while you're doing your descent you can be watching the the predicted line and where you are and know if you need to correct at all or if you're you know coming down in a timely manner obviously in the big jets you can use the the green banana as they call it and things like that in the um ethos display but okay let's Zoom back in so I'm just using the mouse wheel to do that you can also Zoom vertically so you can scroll this which is useful so you might go you might have zoomed that way and you might want some more vertical separation here to make sense of it so you can do that and then scroll this back down I just made it steeper for myself yeah just so you can see it more easily okay so let's come back the last thing I really want to look at is the tools menu little navmap is fantastically flexible so if we go and look in options there are many many sections to this so if we go look in startup and updates it's all you know the basics around should I look for new versions and that kind of thing um user interface you could choose the language display and text you can choose the size of text throughout the various parts of the interface units you can choose the units that are used everywhere the map itself you can choose what gets tooltips so you can you know you can really find control how detailed things are map navigation you can configure how the mouse works with it I would recommend you don't because you probably want to learn the way it works rather than try and twist it map display you can completely control you know the size and thickness and colors of things the like the coloring of the flight plan and the line thicknesses that kind of stuff the users as well um you can go and completely control it again the labels that appear on the map you can control so on the flight plan you can you know switch on and off the various labels so on a an AI multiplayer online you can switch on and on like the indicated AirSpeed for example um map display Keys okay so this gets into you remember we saw we could choose different maps from different providers some of them are commercial so you can put an API key in so say you've got a commercial agreement with mapbox for example you could get their API key and drop it in and then suddenly you can use their maps in little nav map uh map display online um yeah I'm not going to get too much into that that's to do with showing where the controllers are in that Sim I haven't shown you that yet simulated aircraft so you know details about the aircraft being drawn from the simulator the flight plan a few options around that weather where it's getting the data from NOAA or vaccine or ivao or the simulator itself weather files so you could have actually you know data files that have got the weather in them online flying notice I've got this set to custom I use a service called virtualflight.online that I made actually that anybody running a small program called transmitter can transmit their position those were all those little red airplanes you saw on the map if you actually want to see that go and visit virtual flights online on the web and click on transmitter it's a tiny little program you can run I can show you it here if I go and run it this is transmitter if I connect it to the simulator it's connected and if I pull this down it's reporting my longitude latitude altitude heading AirSpeed ground speed and last Landing rate and aircraft type and then I go on to the map so I could go and look in the user the clients list in Search and see myself there and that's all it does so that allows that to happen where this maybe becomes more interesting is if you are flying with that Sim you can show it on the map so I can have that Sim shown directly on the map along with others like ivao and pilot Edge so we'll quickly go and do that so we'll zoom out and we'll switch on the online there's a lot of planes isn't there this is why I don't typically have this on so these are all the people around the world flying on the vatsim and when you can click on one you get a lot of information because you get all their flight plan and everything as well that they filed but beyond just the aircraft you get a lot more with that Sim you also get the sectors so we're going to turn off our sectors and we'll go for the OTR ones these are the vaccine sectors like controllers that are online right now and sectors that are being manned so if you go and click on a sector it tells us about that sector um actually it doesn't show us if it is manned does it that's a shame um yeah interesting if we can click on one of these so it gives you all of the information but unfortunately not whether it's being manned or not so you'd have to use something like um uh the you know one of the many vatsim websites that can show you that or one of the the client applications okay so go back to the tools menu we'll put that back to you custom oh I want just custom Dynamite which uses the URL um if I go to web server this is quite a nice trick little nav map can actually act as a web server so then you can use the URL elsewhere that would include certain add-ons from flight Sim dot two that let you have little nav map appearing inside the aircraft yeah so as a tablet or you know a pop-up window which you could then obviously see in VR and things like that so if you go web server and if you switch it on start the web server you get a URL you can use so if I go and open that up we'll see that in the browser and that's actually going you know over the web that's actually been broadcast in a browser now so obviously it's not quite as Rich functionality all you can really do is move around but you're seeing the same stuff being broadcast that's rendered in the Sim basically okay so if we come back we'll stop that web server cine Library database yeah there's not really much to do in there but hopefully that gives you some idea though of just how rich an application little enough map is it's pretty stunning really we're going to turn off some of this stuff that I don't use um I'm just trying to think if I've actually missed anything along the way it keeps a logbook um it you've got the aircraft performance you've got the scenery Library management so you can have multiple simulators and flick it between using each one the scenery database you can connect to multiple simulators there's a plugin for it for X-Plane which allows little navmap to see where you are in X-Plane as well um yes the interface is infinitely configurable it's just a very very powerful very flexible program but it doesn't have to be super complicated so if we just very quickly before we stop let's go and do a final example of building a flight out so we'll reset this to default so it's as it would have been when we first started it we'll say new Flight Plan so when you first load into this and you see yourself on the ground you might say Okay I want to fly from here to here and I want to fly via this VOR and I want to fly via this VOR oops right click add VOR and then you could go and program that into your plane or you could save this as a pln file and load it in in the menu of flexing but you could program that into your plane or just fly visually and use this as a reference which is just as valid and that gives you obviously effectively a moving visual map which you can use while you're on route to look up navigation codes or distances and measurements because remember you can right click and you can measure distances yeah and again they stay on the map so you could just use that itself you don't have to do a flight plan and then you could see obviously you can see yourself so you could be flying along that route you know seeing where you can get to by the same token if you are an air traffic controller with a group flight you can use this for navmap as your air traffic control station help you do that some of the maps are actually dark so if you go and look in the uh where was it I'm not going to remember where this was now I was in the world icon isn't it I think there's a dark version map box so let me know we don't want that carto dark there we go obviously you can go and change all of those colorings that we saw in the options so you could make a dark version of little nav map that looks more like a radar display that's totally up to you I'm just going to go for uh openstreetmap because it's nice and quick okay so there you go little nav map for all of the simulators basically anything that supports the Sim connect interface will work with little enough map and I'm going to leave it there I think we've covered quite enough okay I'll see you again soon

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 55,885

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Id: 5sKg0xwDMVY

Length: 66min 49sec (4009 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022