Scudrunners

Found this on LinkedIn, posted by Director of Operational Safety at NavCan:

Under the umbrella of the Canadian Performance-based Aviation Action Team (CPAAT), a sub group is well on its way to look at the operational concepts to switch the heading reference system from Magnetic to True in aviation by 2030. Half of Canadian airspace is referenced to True already.

The timing of the work came about just as ADs were released for an aircraft type with well out of date mag var tables resident in the base maps of its FMS that can't be updated.

Internationally, the International Association of Institutes of Navigation (IAIN) is picking up the torch. There is a lot of money to be saved by air carriers never having to update inertial or FMS mag var tables going forward. The 12th and 13th ICAO ANCs had papers that presented the why. Now we are in to the how.

Jeppesen assisted us in assessing a method of change where they just entered '0's for every mag var value in our cyclic FMS database for our flight test aircraft. The nav systems on the aircraft performed as expected.

The Dutch ANSP, LVNL, presented a paper to the European Navigation Council last fall.

ANSP AIM departments would no longer need to update charts solely for mag var changes. No more rotating VORs. No more renumbering runways.

Lots of work to do but it is well worth the look.

Looking at the current position of the north magnetic pole, just a shade WNW of the true pole I should think they start looking at this. It appears to me that the area of compass unreliability needs dramatic review.

I know this article or reference is mostly for international over flights and such. It seems to me with the rapid movement and concerns of stability of the magnetic pole the world should be looking at moving entirely to true and forget about magnetic. The tech is now to do this and even with making GPS mandatory for any IFR flight would make a logical "next" step.

Maybe if one had the whole article and not a para phase from social media this is in fact where things are going.

Ironically we operated in magnetic on Baffin Island up until about the 90's. Once aircraft became equipped to easily update true via GPS people switched back to true, since those were the rules and magnetic systems where not as good as the old steam driven gyros and compensators.

The time is now to start thinking about switching all navigation to true headings because the north magnetic pole is so volatile.

IIRC, the CF-5 had the capability of operating in "True"... (Never used it, but it was there)

I was flying a lear 35 with all the new ahars stuff to find out, after digging through the manual, it was not certified to operate in true mode in the area of compass unreliability -- and to think 90% of the flying was in that area, the company choose to ignore it and shortly after that with additional factors considered I bailed, I was retired anyway so I went back to my roots, a DC3 in NWO - now that for the most part was fun.