Dme how does it work

You can reach Swayne at swayne boldmethod. To: Separate email addresses with commas. Now What? All Videos. Planes Careers. Live from the Flight Deck. Swayne Martin Swayne is an editor at Boldmethod, certified flight instructor, and an Embraer First Officer for a regional airline. Recommended Stories. Fewer thunderstorms and less turbulence mean more days in the air for you. Here are the advantages of fall weather flying in a GA aircraft.

Easy Mental Math For Pilots. If you're like us, you probably don't consider yourself a math expert. Here are a few easy tips and tricks you can use to make mental math in the cockpit a little easier. Have you ever filed IFR to a destination with no instrument approach? DME is a fundamentally simple technology that uses a radio signal to transmit to the VOR ground station. A transponder at the VOR station replies.

The DME unit onboard the aircraft measures how long it takes to receive a reply from the station. It can then calculate the distance of a straight line between the two points.

The VOR has to have the right equipment. Some localizers also use DME for instrument approaches. Sharp readers may have already picked up that DME distances are straight line measurements. The length of that line is going to be longer than a line drawn on a chart, which would be the true distance. Therefore, DME has a built-in error because it measures the slant range distance. When the aircraft is very high or near the station, the error is more pronounced.

While this may sound like a big problem, in truth, it is usually only noticeable when you are very near the VOR. That means that for an aircraft cruising at 10, feet, their DME is going to be accurate anytime they are more than 10 nm away from the VOR. As they descend, they will get a more precise DME distance even closer. Not that bad, really.

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