Little Navmap basics and setup.

hello everyone on today's video we're going to be taking a look at a tool called little nav map now this is a free application which is also portable meaning you don't have to install anything if you want to try it now you can get it by going out to google and basically type in a little nav map it's pretty straightforward you're just going to download a little zip file which is going to give you this neat little program that gives you a lot of really really really awesome options in it especially if you're doing any sort of navigation or anything along those lines now the reason i'm bringing this video up now is because a bunch of people have been requesting videos involved more advanced navigational techniques and i said well that sounds absolutely great i'd love to do that unfortunately a lot of the old-school navigational techniques and the really really meaty nasty new ones require you to have paper and pencil in plotting charts and unfortunately it's a little difficult to do that on the computer but this particular tool can actually do a lot of that work for you so we're definitely going to take advantage of that today so let's go ahead and get rocket so the first things first whenever you're working with this tool again i'm just going to give you just a general overview here i'm not here to blow you away or anything like that you're going to want to make sure you get yourself some navigation data built into the program itself if you see this little button up here it says load a flight simulator scenery library into the nav database it will give you the ability to select a navigator and press load what this will do is grab all of the information out of that flight simulator and actually save it into here as you can see this is the last time that i've gone and updated it so i'm actually going to bring it in and go ahead and load in all the new scenery that came out a little while ago all right thanks to the magic of editing you didn't have to sit through that for three and a half minutes so now when i press the ok button it has imported all of the data from microsoft flight simulator directly into the simulator everything is here now all the different airways all the different airports the navigational aids if you can think of it you can probably find it somewhere on this map today so next thing we're going to do is we're going to take a look at the absolute basics of using this program again like i said i don't want to get any too too carried away here because if we do then we could be here for a very long time and i can do a whole series of videos on this particular tool if you want to honestly it's like the one thing that i use like the most for this process and i usually use a bunch of different tools so let's go ahead and take a look at the things we're going to need to do let's say we want to create a really simple flight plan so let's say i want to go from hartford all the way down here to a tweed new haven not the world's most complicated or long oh by the way one thing you want to keep an eye out for is at the top of the screen you have a couple different projection types these projection types are going to be stupid important for us when we get into some of the more advanced navigational concepts so if i do say switch to a spherical projection you're going to want to make sure that you try that if i switch to mercator projection obviously you're going to want to switch to that now you're probably saying here what's the difference well this particular projection being mercator puts everything on a cylinder when you switch to a spherical projection it puts it on an actual circle which is going to cause things like what your headings are going to be to shift significantly and over time you'll see exactly what i mean i'm not saying there's one that's better than the other all i'm saying is just be aware that you're going to be using both sets of these okay so the next thing we're going to want to do is we're going to go ahead and create like i said a stupid quick flight plan easiest way to do this is you simply find where you want to start you right click on it you can do set height as the departure and then you simply right click on your destination and go ahead and set this as my destination so that is the world's simplest flight plan as you can see this would be for a vfr flight we can now come over here we can dial in what altitude we're going to be cruising at let's say 3 500 feet actually we're heading to the west so we're going to be 4 500 feet it will automatically calculate things like top of climb and top of descent now you're probably sitting there going hey i just downloaded this i'm trying this out seems to be working but my top of climb on top of descent have not generated what's the deal well this program allows you to dial in performance of a specific aircraft now the way this step works is we're going to take a look at this in a separate video because that's going to be something that's going to be really really important is basically what you do is you come in here dial in the known performance of a given aircraft and then it will actually dynamically calculate things like when you need to climb descend everything along those lines but again we're trying to keep this as simple as possible for today so we have ourselves our handy-dandy vfr flight plan again point a point b nothing too crazy now if you take a look here let me go ahead and expand this so you can see it you'll see that each one of my little waypoints here has a set of different information on it it has a course it is a true course which is going to be very important to us later on it has our distance which in this case is 30 nautical miles not too bad it has how long it expects us to take again this is based on the dialed in performance here tells us roughly how much fuel we use a lot of people were asking about fuel planning again this can do it all dynamically and in the next video we'll show you how to actually do those calculations so that you can get your stuff that you need to do you've got your marks everything else is a rocking and ready to go now one thing i want to do though is i want to experiment with my flight plan a little bit now normally when we do a flight plan we want to go ahead if we're doing vfr add in waypoints every so many miles so one of the tricks that we're going to use and again this is going to come up as we get a little bit deeper into this tool is we can actually add something called a range ring what a range ring is a simple little ring on the map that lets you know how far apart everything is so if i were to right click for example in hartford you'll notice that if i scroll my mouse down there's a thing that says add range ring if i click on that it's going to give me some preset range rings which allow me to go ahead and estimate distances very accurately now the problem with this range ring and again this is going to be tremendously important for us when we start doing triangulation later on is that it's not really designed well you know it's got these really really wide arcs that don't really do much for me so let me go ahead and delete that because it doesn't do much for me so we need to edit that so to edit that i can go up to my settings page up at the tippy top and there's actually an option where you can change your range ring radii so i can go ahead and say let me have a 10 whoop we'll do a 10 we'll do 20 40 50 60 70 80 90 100. now if i press ok and go ahead and add that range ring in here like this you'll notice that i have nice even intervals that burn your eyes out just a little tiny bit but the reason i did this is because when i want to pick out positions on a map i usually like to do it by measuring how far apart each one of those two points are so in this case i've got myself my heart for brainerd my first waypoint would have to be somewhere along here now i'm without actually being able to see too much what's going on here i notice there's a very large interchange right here on the right and i also notice that you have merida markham airport which is located right over here on the right as well we also have looking over at robertson field but the thing i'd probably go with this middle town because it is a very very distinctive bridge going through it you literally cannot miss it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come here on the map right click and there's a thing this is add position to flight plan now when i do that it's going to go ahead and mark this little position right here so now if i come in here you actually have the ability to go ahead you know center on that you can also copy the coordinates onto under clipboard if you're trying to pass it somewhere else or anything along those lines the other really thing that's nice is you can go down here which says edit you can go and give this a name look for middle i will call this a middletown bridge and we'll say look on your right for the bridge so now we have our waypoint and we know exactly where it is so now i can go down to my next range wing and again every 10 miles is what they recommend now looks like we have north haven right here on the right we also have a distinctive mountain as well as two little reservoirs down here i don't oh goofy of vineyards actually know exactly where that is we have wallingford over here on the left which is going to be kind of difficult to see if i go out a little bit obviously we have north haven which is very distinctive we have meridian which is a little bit closer to us but i'm just taking a look along here where my next waypoint is probably going to be i'm actually going to put it a little tiny bit short and i'll go ahead and put it right here and i'll go ahead and add myself another point again this is just keep it nice and simple again i'm not doing anything too too crazy here right click i'm going to edit this position we're going to call it a res i can never spell the word reservoir reservoir right now it's a reserve or not reservoir look on at left wing for res i'm going to press ok so now i know my next waypoint is going to be looking for that reservoir our final waypoint is going to be of course our destination so i'm not going to worry about that now the reason this is so convenient for us is now if i go over here and actually take a look at my flight plan it's actually broken my flight plan into smaller chunks so you can see here that the estimated wind again if you want to get wind you can go up to weather and you can actually select where you want the wind you can set it to be a manual wind if you choose to do so you can set it to be an automatic wind there's a lot of different modes that you can use for this particular purpose again i'll use the wind from actually in the real world you can get it out of the flights if you need to let me shut that off and you can see that it breaks everything down for us quite nicely again this is if we're doing a basic vfr flight plan it gives us our course which is very helpful this is where we're going to be pointing the airplane gives us our true course which is going to be stupid useful for us later on and of course because this is things like our distances or time remaining it gives us our fuel calculations so like you know if i went up here and said recent performance let's switch this to cessna 172 and let it process you could see it automatically dynamically updated everything for me so i can see exactly how much fuel i expect to have remaining it tells me exactly how many pounds it tells me all my little remarks you know the greatest thing in the world is though you can come up here and you can print this flight plan and actually stick on here with all your individual pieces on a nice little sheet of paper which you can slap onto your knee board so you're ready to rock again i can't believe this is a free tool you know we i was never so spoiled in the real world to have stuff like this so that's it for a vfr plan again that's super simple if we wanted to export it over to flight simulator all i have to do is take our mouse to the top of the screen click on export flight plan all we have to do is give it a name press save and just like that it's been saved into the flight simulator and each one of our waypoints has been saved into the flight simulator meaning in flight simulator we can actually pick where we want our waypoints to go you can see how wonderfully useful that is as a tool for vfr flight planning so let's go ahead and start over i know you're sitting there going wait but you did all that work it's like ah don't worry about it so now we're going to do an ifr flight plan so we'll make it a little bit different let's say we're going from francis green here we're going into let's say new work so i'm gonna go ahead and make this my departure let me come all the way down to newark new jersey which is a very very very very busy airport come down here and said this is my destination but i want to go ahead and make this an ifr flight so the way i do this is actually pretty straightforward if you take your mouse to the top of the screen there's this thing that says create a flight plan between departure and destination if i click that it's going to pop this little box up that'll let me go ahead and dial in some details now the first thing is you want to guess your cruise let's see what is our total distance here just taking a look at 138 okay so that's going to be 10 that's going to be about 14 000 feet if i had to guess we're traveling even distances naturally press the adjust button oh this is oh my bad my bad this is supposed to be an ifr flight much better adjust so it estimates six thousand feet the reason it estimates six thousand feet is on account of the fact that this particular aircraft is assumed to be you know a little cessna let me grab a boeing 747 here i've got it an alternate error easy to fix let's go ahead and take a look what i've done here zero pounds per hour i can definitely see what my issue is there two two seven seven zero press okay uh my alternate speed is wrong but that's okay all right go to my flight plan you can see that it's pre-calculated everything for me let's go back to the little option here now you can select what airways you want to use we can adjust our cruise altitude let's say like i said 14 000 feet you can even select if it prefers airways or direct travel this is actually pretty cool so i'm going to press the calculate button it's going to sit there and think and whoosh look at this perfectly planned ifr flight plan between these two destinations now this is what gets this program so incredibly cool and again i just want you to be familiar with this before we start using it for mean things is the fact i can now come up here to francis green right click and actually have it show different types of procedures from it which i think is absolutely amazing you know again i've already added this as a particular plane here but what i could do is i could come up here to procedures go to airports if i type in kpvd kpvd oh gotta give her vamando obviously it's the middle of italy it's not not gonna do us very much good here let's say okay okay pvd there we go now i can just double click that real quickly and of course you can show all your approaches and information on it like if i just show information it's going to go call up a little bit of data which is going to show me everything i need to know down here on the right hand side which again is already absolutely wonderful so you know i come here i select my airport and i can go ahead and set some stuff up for this as well yeah so the trick here is all i have to do is come to my airport and double click on it and it's going to bring up all of my procedures over here on the right now what's so great here is i've got all my stars and all my sids now over here at francis green we don't have any sids listed so i'm not going to worry about that too too much i know dps but if we did we could actually dial in a dynamic dp so let's go ahead and progress ourselves all the way down to new work here if i went over to newark i could double click on it and now you can pick all of your different stars and sids as well now watch this if i hold my mouse and click on one of these it'll actually show you in blue on the map the shape of the star this is the most wonderful thing i've ever seen ever when it comes to predicting where we need to go with aircraft taking a look at this real quickly i realized pretty much instantaneously that none of these stars is going to serve us any good here because we're going to be coming out of the easterly direction so unfortunately i'm not going to use them but when it comes to approaches you can also preview each one of the approaches dynamically including all the things like altitudes as well so i'm seeing the rnav and everything like this of course our wind today it shows us that the wind is coming out of this direction you can see this again predicted wind here it's coming basically straight out of the west unfortunately that gives us runway two niner so that's what we have for roamway two niner we have rnav29 that's not too too bad oh it's two two my bad ah there we go r9x rnfy i'm gonna do this one right here and look at that gorgeous gorgeous plane that comes out of teterboro we could take one that comes out of the south we could even take this one out of basically that area i'm just going to right click it and i'm going to poop stick it right into the flight plan look at that now we have a completed ifr flight plan ready to go all we have to do now is go up to file click on the export to flight simulator boop off it goes into flight simulator and now we can fly this entire flight with all that what did that take five minutes or so to go ahead and program all these things so you can see just how incredibly useful this tool is when we start doing more advanced things what we're going to start doing is actually coming over to our different pieces and we can do things like adding a range rings for different navigational aids like in this case this little ring here shows you the maximum range of that navigational aid so you can already see where that's going to be important we can also do really really crazy things where we can go ahead and draw lines on the chart which gives us the ability to go ahead and predict positions which is going to be tremendously important for us once we start getting into the more advanced concepts all right hopefully this video is helpful as far as showing this tool by the way if the screen gets a little too crowded you have all these options up here to go ahead and shut things off that you don't need again you can make it so you only see your primary airport or anything like that and of course if you shut your waypoints off it gets to be a lot cleaner there's also a thing up at the top that lets you do things like switch to terrain mode which i really really like you can also switch to you know cardo mode you can even if you really want to get normal you can switch to plane mode which is a super awesome because it keeps everything very very simplified for you right hopefully this is helpful as far as giving you kind of a little nudge next video we're going to be taking a look at how we can actually load the performance of an aircraft into this program following that we'll take a look at some of the fundamentals of what i like to call intermediate navigation that's going to be navigational techniques using you know very very accurate timing calculating wind when you don't have a gps and everything along those lines enjoy

Channel: P Gatcomb

Views: 37,895

Keywords: MSFS, Little Navmap, Setup, IFR, VFR, Planning

Id: PrCnI55Ef5A

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021