Lateral navigation

It's putting you where you expect to be put.

Well, what about, like, a, a plus V, an LNAV plus V that's more advisory? Do you mess with any of that?

that?Um, we will fly... [coughs] Excuse me.

Uh, you're right, it's advisory glide path only, so we are not certifying that plus V. Um, we do fly the glide path during the course of flying the approach, and what we will do on a lot of those is we intentionally fly a dot low.

So, uh, Other than that, it's pretty much a standard Airbus 319 and landing on the snow and the ice pretty much feels the same as landing on the tarmac.

And, yeah, the navigation equipment on board, we most often would operate it to an LNAV or an LNAV VNAV minima there so we don't have any extra equipment on board to allow us to navigate in terms of the approaches.

and Louise has touched on the surface.

I mean, going back 20-odd years, when we first started working with Airbus on this project, no one had landed a jetliner in Antarctica before on ice, well, in Antarctica at all.

If you've been flying instrument flight rules, or IFR, for any length of time, you've seen the alphabet soup on approach plates.

LNAV slash VNAV.

LPVLP, each one represents a different level of precision.

And they're all on the same plate.

Most instrument pilots know this.

But let's be specific about what each line means and why it matters.

The bottom line on most RNAV plates is lateral navigation only, which the industry abbreviates as LNAV.

Your GPS is giving you course guidance left and right, but there is no electronic glide path.