World Wide Guide to FS Scenery Design | Utilities | Chartmakers and Planners

Nav

Nav, a fine piece of freeware, is one of several scenery file (BGL) viewers, and includes a simple flight planner. It will show and print a map of all the navigational aids, runways and airports in your scenery files, let you measure distances between places, search the files for specific items, and create a simple flight plan showing navigational aid frequencies and distances between references points.

Nav will keep a list of all the BGL files you use often, and load them all with one menu command. This is handy for FS users who might have BGL files scattered through several directories. It can also search a directory tree and automatically add to the list all the BGL files it finds.

It will also export VORs, NDBs, Airports, Runways, and ILSs in a format suitable for import into Flight Simulator Flight Shop (with the help of FSFSIMP, Robert M. MacKay's database import utility). With the help of FLTREC, Adam Softran's flight data recorder, Nav can also display the ground track of a flight.

Source code, written in Visual C++ Version 4, is provided with the program under the GNU General Public License. This means essentially that you can do whatever you want with it, except make money with it. 

Nav 1.6 is a Win32 program. This means you will need Windows 95, Windows NT (version 3.51 or later), or the old 16 bit Windows with the Win32s extensions (version 1.3 or higher). If you still use Windows 3, you may wish to download Nav 1.5 (see link below).

In addition to numerous bug fixes, Nav version 1.6 includes the following:

- expanded flight planner to account for wind and aircraft performance
- added ATIS display
- added closest airport to ILS, runway, and ATIS details display
- added Map - Center At dialog
- added mag deviation to ILS details display
- added keyboard shortcuts to the flight plan buttons
- added optional automatic GPS insertion in flight plan routing
- use d-m-s degrees instead of decimal degrees for GPS waypoints
- smarter label placement algorithm
- spherical world view mostly works
- improved great circle distance algorithm
- data in the formerly optional NavMap.zip is now included with Nav distribution

Documentation:  Good.
Author: Ted Wright
Distribution: Freeware
Version: 1.6
Date of main program file: 6 December 1996
Size of compressed file: 909 KB

NAV16.ZIP (for Windows 95/NT)
NAV15.ZIP (for older versions of Windows)