Just a general question. Anyone tested if magnetic variation is properly modeled? In Italy we have only a 2° variation so It’s not easy to notice but northern US and Canada should be pretty intense. Anyone notice if on board instruments report it properly?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but do you have to live in the US or Canada to check on the magnetic variation in the US or Canada in a simulator?
Modelled? Very much so. I flew out of St John’s, Newfoundland earlier, and if I hadn’t allowed for the 18-degree declination I’d have been well off course. Though the 75-knot crosswind at 12,000 feet wasn’t helping either…
Why would the simulator care where you live? The sim declinations at airports match the real ones, and you can find them online easily enough.
I think you misunderstood him…
Exactly my point, and why I wondered about the original post.
Ah yes, I see what you meant.
Simply because aligning on a runaway 353 magnetic, if instrument is showing geographic I would see 355 in Italy… And I could not notice much the difference while in northern US i would have almost a 20 degree difference between the official chart and what I see on instruments. Hope I was clear in my explanation…
Unless they even modeled the runway wrong LOL…
The numbers on runways are magnetic alignments, rounded to the nearest 10 degrees. Which is why some occasionally have to be renumbered, as declination shifts.
@ThatAJWGuy If you precisely align yourself with the runway and you watch at your compass you should see 353 if on the chart is written 353… because on the chart you have magnetic reference and the compass show magnetic direction. If your compass is not properly modelling magnetic variation it would show simply your geographic direction. That, in italy, would be a minimal difference (only 2 degree) and it’s easy to not even notice it. In northern US and canada (as magnetic north pole is really close there) that error is much more (even passing 18 degree if I recall properly) so you really can’t miss that error. Hope you get what I mean.
It has been brought before, a bit before release.
I also believe there is something going on with track, magnetic variation calculation, true north and magnetic North at some high latitudes (not along the Agonic Line); for example in Alaska and Maine You have around ±15° magnetic deviation and seems to affect both VOR and LOC navigation, it also seems to affect parked AI airplanes, they are not aligned with the parking spot lines. According to the charts.
A good test is Cape Town International (FACT). Magnetic variation is 23W. Runway 01 actually points west of north.
No. I have not. But most of my flights have been in Europe till now and if that would be modelled roughly I would have not noticed much.
I people flight a lot in the US I assume they would have been extremely annoyed by a bad modelled magnetic variation.
This simulator uses the same magdec.bgl file as FSX.
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I believe You, if that is the case it probably has outdated data and could explain why people are having issues tracking VOR/LOC’s to stations with high MAG DEC and also explain parked planes headings not aligning to the parking lines.
This might be, but there is another interesting file about this, located in the main application folder (in the WindowsApp folder):
egm2008-15perdegree.gtx
This resemble a table of floats form which you could calculate the magnetic declination by interpolating between 4 values (there is a 40 bytes header followed by the float32 values).
If this is the case and the file name is any indication, this would be indicating FS2020 is using measures from 2008. Could this just be a higher definition table than the magdec.bgl file?
I asked myself that question yesterday and did a quick check (near SFO California) and the variance looked very close to published isogonic data.
Happy Trails