George T. Rublein   
Associate Professor
The College of William & Mary
Mailing Address:                                                        Office:
College of William and Mary                                           123 Jones Hall
Department of Mathematics                                            Phone: 757/221-2028
P.O. Box 8795
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795                                        Fax: 757/221-2988 or 757/221-7400
 
E-mail  gtrubl@math.wm.edu
 
Useful web-sites for Math 104
Some VOR's are co-located at airports. I have seen these out the window of the terminal in Richmond, VA and at Washington National. The Taos VOR is visible to the south from an automobile traveling on US 64 between Tres Piedras and the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge in northern New Mexico.

The FAA DOS airport design program, AD42D, is available at the arphome website.
Once there, you have to go to Browse by Topic, and then Computer Software.
The FAA site is here

If you want to download wind data for use in the FAA program AD42D,
press wind. The default name for the downloaded file is wind.zip.
NOTE: This is a self-unzipping executable. Before running this DOS program,
you should change the file extension from .zip to .exe.
You can do this at download time by saving the document as wind.exe
or you can change the extension after saving.
Some advice about AD42D and wind data is contained in readme.

The National Weather Service has a very nice web-site where up-to-the-minute weather readings
for pilots are available. All states, all airports. The site is Weather .

One should click on the "Standard Brief" button in the Weather Guide column. Then click on METARs (by ICAO identifier)

Note that, as with virtually all internet sources, wind directions at the nws site are given relative to TRUE north. At an airport they have to be corrected for magnetic variation. Naturally, radio voice transmissions from approach control or the tower at an airport give the wind direction relative to compass north so that the pilot can fly the airplane instead of doing arithmetic problems. AWOS sources give the equivalent of tower data so they also report wind directions relative to compass north.

There is another NWS web-site that provides a translation of the abbreviations used at the previous site. That translation site is at Translate

A web-site with a complete listing of AWOS/ASOS telephone numbers is at ASOS .
At this site there is also a link to the nws weather site.

In lieu of subscribing to NOAA/FAA for runway charts, one may look at AIRNAV where a complete text version of airport data is given for every public airport in the US. No graphics. One may also get access to technical data for VOR's and NDB's at this site. At AOPA there are graphic versions of the taxiway plates for large airports. These are also available on-line from the FAA at NACO

A beautiful live graphic explanation of the operation of aircraft navigation instruments may be found at TIM . This simulator is self-explanatory.

The e6-b is a hand calculator designed specifically for the needs of pilots. Virtual versions are available on the web, either interactively (http://www.buckeye-illinois.com) or for download elsewhere. A search on "virtual e6-b" should produce some results.

Thumbnail sketches of the world isogonic pattern may be found at USGS . Click on the Magnetic Charts link at the site.