For student pilots. Is a runway heading true or magnetic?

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Michael Gallagher

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Easy to remember if you look at these examples. Both are runway 8. Should be close to horizontal if it was true heading. Alas, it is not. It is MAGNETIC. And you can appreciate how far from true heading it can be.

RUNWAY 8 IN NEWFOUNDLAND (deviates west - away from due east):
IMG_6328.jpg

RUNWAY 8 IN BOULDER (deviates toward due east):
IMG_6331.jpg
 
Ah, to live in an area of high variation. It's analogous to me learning to fly in Colorado. It was usually readily apparent if things were AGL or MSL.
 
This would make wind reports harder to translate in my brain if I was flying in a place with significant variation since winds are given with reference to true north. flying into runway 8 with winds from 020 would actually mean quite a crosswind component.
 
Michael Gallagher said:
This would make wind reports harder to translate in my brain if I was flying in a place with significant variation since winds are given with reference to true north. flying into runway 8 with winds from 020 would actually mean quite a crosswind component.
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If heard on the radio (ATIS/AWOS), wind direction should be magnetic. If written (METAR), it should be true.

That way, you don't have to think about the conversion while you're flying, but only when you're reading your briefing and planning your flight.
 
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I did a trip from NY to London, and back, in the late 80's. I thought one or more of the airports we stopped at had true runway numbers. I do not see it now. We stopped at Goose, Frobisher, and Reykjavík.
 
That makes sense because north of a certain latitude (I don't remember exactly but believe it's north of the Arctic Circle / 67* N) all headings are true because magnetic variation becomes hard to keep track of because it changes much more over shorter distances.
 
Plano Pilot said:
I did a trip from NY to London, and back, in the late 80's. I thought one or more of the airports we stopped at had true runway numbers. I do not see it now. We stopped at Goose, Frobisher, and Reykjavík.
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Thule AB, Greenland (BGTL) is true. So are the airways in the area and vectors received from Thule approach.
 
MRC01 said:
If heard on the radio (ATIS/AWOS), wind direction should be magnetic. If written (METAR), it should be true.

That way, you don't have to think about the conversion while you're flying, but only when you're reading your briefing and planning your flight.
Click to expand...
I remember going to an AOPA safety seminar a lot of years ago. They gave a quiz: they used an airport somewhere in the Pacific N/W with multiple rwys. There was traffic in the pattern using RWY A (I can’t remember the numbers). You read the wx on the fancy panel after dialing it up on XM, or wherever, and the winds favor RWY B. What do you do?

The trick question that caught everyone was that the inflight wx in this scenario was giving winds in true, not magnetic, and the difference was enough to make you think they were right down the other rwy.

Around here we are used to there not being much difference between magnetic and true so nobody really caught on.
 
Matthew said:
The trick question that caught everyone was that the inflight wx in this scenario was giving winds in true, not magnetic, and the difference was enough to make you think they were right down the other rwy.
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We did a Pilot Workshops did a scenario on this a few years ago. An instrument approach in which the pilot relied on the METAR (true and delayed) instead of the AWOS (magnetic and current).
 
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