Worldwide Update – Decommissioned Navaids

As navigation technology for aviation has become heavily dependent on GPS there has been a move from airspace regulators to decommission more and more ground-based radio navigation beacons.  They require maintenance, licensing, power to operate, get damaged, affected by weather and atmospheric conditions. So we have seen a large number of NDBs VORs and DMEs decommissioned in favour of GPS navigation. This is accurately reflected in Microsoft Flight Simulator, with navigation aids reflecting the current real world.

But what about if you want to fly and older aircraft without GPS? There are a lot of amazing add-ons now from the golden era of navigation and many are fitted with a GPS. But if you want to travel across the Pacific using NDBs, compasses, dead reckoning and stop watches you are really going to miss those 5000 NDBs that have been decommissioned in the last few years!

Finding a definitive source of decommissioned radio navigation aids is difficult but I have extracted all of the radio beacons from the default navigation scenery files of Flight Simulator X. FSX contains a snapshot of the aeronautical world navigation data from 2006 and while it may have less radio beacons than earlier simulators, it is a darn good starting point. FSX contains some 5000 more radio navigation aids than MSFS2020.

An intensive analysis of the differences between MSFS2020 and FSX navaids was needed to find out which navigation aids have been decommissioned since 2006. This required numerous considerations and checks as there have been a number of changes over the years. The goal was to build a database of navigation aids that existed in FSX, but not in MSFS2020, to be able to add those decommissioned radios back in to the modern simulator. NDBs were treated separately to VOR/DME as they were often co-located.

What was left was approximately 500 VOR, DME or VORDMEs that were in FSX that are no longer present in MSFS2020. Almost 4000 NDBs that were in FSX are no longer in MSFS2020.

These decommissioned navigation aids have been compiled into scenery files for the entire world, allowing for traditional radio navigation for older aircraft in MSFS2020.

INSTALLATION

Extract and move the cm-fsx-navaids folder into your MSFS2020 community folder.

NOTES

-          This scenery has been created in a way that will not replace or affect any stock MSFS2020 navigation aids.

-          This scenery has NOT been tested at all with any navigraph data – I have no idea if there will be conflicts.

-          There should be no conflicts with any default scenery but any add-on scenery that adds or changes radio navigation may be affected. Editing the content.xml to adjust the scenery priorities may help.

-          There are no scenery objects added as a result of this update. Maybe in the future but sounds like a lot of potential conflicts to resolve!

SUPER IMPORTANT NOTE

This is a first release and while it has taken me hours to resolve the duplicates and conflicts I haven’t been able to test every navigation radio. I am keen to get feedback through private messages for errors or changes.

But this has also literally taken many hours of work to get done as accurately as I can, so please, if you enjoy and appreciate the work feel free to buy me a coffee or donate through paypal.