Track Up or North Up?

Track Up or North Up?

  • Track Up

    Votes: 134 66.0%

  • North Up

    Votes: 62 30.5%

  • No Preference

    Votes: 4 2.0%

  • Huh?

    Votes: 3 1.5%
  • Total voters
    203
I'm a "track up" guy like most fighter types since that's the way our displays in the A-6, RF-4, and F-111 worked. OTOH, every B-52 nav I ever knew wanted "North up" because that's how it was in the Buff.
 
I prefer track up but since I'm a loner in the school on the issue, I quit fighting to have it "my way." :dunno:
 
Well Lee i always fly Track Up , never tried Noth Up. I like to see where i'm going and as far as WX goes i done have it so i'm looking out the window anyway.
Dave G
 
Track up. Keeps things simpler for my little brain.
 
My 295 has some bug where it won't come out of North up mode. You can change the option, but it doesn't change the orientation. Of course when I showed it to the Pacific Coast Avionics guys at Oshkosh it worked fine. I need to do a erase and reset biut I don't want to lose all of my routes and waypoints. *sigh*
 
I guess I am an odd-ball here. I like North Up, and to me I think it gives me the best situational awareness. It creates a tight link between the gps display and what I see on a chart.

Judd
 
jspittler said:
I guess I am an odd-ball here. I like North Up, and to me I think it gives me the best situational awareness. It creates a tight link between the gps display and what I see on a chart.
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Judd,

Here's to the odd-ball club. :cheerswine:

I'm a north-up guy too. IMHO, it improves situational awareness by giving you yet another indication of which way you're really going. If you want to see a track up view, look out the window. :D

FWIW, I have never had a problem "converting" the two in my head. I know some people hold their charts "track up" too, but I do everything north up and just visualize both where I am and which way I'm going on the chart.
 
Well, I'm both. I'm north up on a chart and track up on the GPS. And I haven't had a problem looking from one to the other. The only time I had a problem was when the hubby tried to show me where we were on his chart.....he's a track up guy......and I really got confused until I realized the chart was upside down. :p

Kaye
 
Nav8tor said:
What's your preference?
Click to expand...

Depends on the scale. Mostly I use this type of equipment on boats, but aircraft is much the same. Small scale tactical manuvering is heads up, large scale strategic viewing is north up.
 
TMetzinger said:
Track up when Navigating, North up when zooming WAY out for the big weather picture.
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Sounds logical. I like track up, but if you had the luxury of two moving map GPS's, you could run one each.
 
I use North Up - always found the "spinning" moving map confusing during sharp turns and holding patterns.
 
North up. I don't read a sectional or enroute sideways or upside down, or any other map/chart for that matter. I also hate the spinning world that Barry mentioned.

I wonder if there is a correlation between the size of ones ego, and a track up / north up correlation?

With track up, the world revolves around the pilot...
 
Having a big ego is incompatable with being a stay-at-home dad, so I can't say that's my problem.:D

Potato(e), Potahto
 
EdFred said:
North up. I don't read a sectional or enroute sideways or upside down, or any other map/chart for that matter. I also hate the spinning world that Barry mentioned.

I wonder if there is a correlation between the size of ones ego, and a track up / north up correlation?

With track up, the world revolves around the pilot...
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Ed, come on. What can you POSSIBLY know about that?
 
I'm normally track up on a GPS. I hold charts north up. I've never had an issue.

I've tried north up on the GPS for awhile too. It worked alright too--Just seems like most planes I fly are track up if they have a GPS so I've just got used to that.
 
My instructors keep trying to make me track up but I dont get how you can read city names, freqs or anything else upside down. Maybe its a tallant. We're not allowed to use GPSs, apparently that spoils people. I can't figure out why.... :)
 
bstratt said:
I use North Up - always found the "spinning" moving map confusing during sharp turns and holding patterns.
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Just throw the map up into the air and turn really quickly...you'll be fine! hehe j/k
 
North up.

30+ years of reading and working with maps in various ways makes north-up natural.

I nearly made a CFI leave my plane after he started setting the 430 to track-up without talking to me first. "See how much better this works?"... Not to me, it doesn't... and if you mess with airplane equipment like that without advising the PIC first, you'll be finding your way home from a remote airfield.
 
*hiss hiss!* You know he just wanted to play instructor and push buttons. They probably get used to getting away with that with other students. My instructor used to pull that on me all the time. "If you put your course up on the chart, it wont be as confusing." Uhh, sure, until I go to read something. Maps are one of the cheapest forms of navigation but nobody has invented a way to flip a folded up 3 foot long piece of paper around during approach without some form of aggervation and a short period of loosing your spot. One of these days, GPSs are gonna become required in trainers I bet.
 
I had to laugh about the instructor changing the settings. When I did my IR, my instructor went through my aircraft's G430 setup with me, explaining all the fields/configurations he felt were most helpful. He switched the display from Track Up to North Up. I said, fine, I'll go with expert opinion, what do I know?! I never really got comfortable with that set up (all the other stuff really helped), but figured I'd learn.

Get to the checkride, and one of the first things the DE says is "Why in the world do you fly with North Up? That's not really intuitive." (He's a KingAir pilot) I laughed and said "Well, I'm glad to hear you say that. I don't like it either but the instructor put it that way and I left it."

I went back to Track Up at the end of the checkride.
 
If I use a map, I usually fly North up. I can go either way, just easier to put the map on my clipboard with North up.

When flying with a student, I usually suggest that they go track up, but they can do whatever is easiest for them.
 
Track up. My mono-tasking brain can't handle much more thinking. Plus, the only thing important to me is what's ahead...:D
 
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We used to do a lot of what's called nap of the earth flying in the military. Very low, pretty fast and all this gave one time to do was look ahead (maybe a bit left or right), identify a major identifiable feature, check the chart and get your eyes back on the aircraft instruments. Track up really facilitated this. Of course, we had usually done a lot of advanced planning.

So, for immediate stuff on a smaller scale, I'm track up and that's where the Garmins are set when I fly. As has been said, if I'm looking that the bigger picture, north up.

Best,

Dave
 
Track up on my 430 and MX20. OTOH I think there's a reason Garmin gave us a choice. Use what works best for you and a good instructor should understand that.
 
Track up. My friends and I have competitions on who can make the straightest line on flight aware (no autopilot allowed), so track up allows me to see the deviations faster and corrections slightly easier.
 
On my 530 I use nav page 1 track up, on nav page 2 I use track north. Different pages for different phases of flight.

James Dean
 
I formerly navigated high speed rescue boats in inland waterways at night for a living, with the GPS mounted next to the radar display. Track up. Believe me :hairraise: Why give your brain one more thing to have to correlate?
 
North up for me. It helps me know where I am in relation to the airport when talking to the tower or making position reports.
 
alaskaflyer said:
I formerly navigated high speed rescue boats in inland waterways at night for a living, with the GPS mounted next to the radar display. Track up. Believe me :hairraise: Why give your brain one more thing to have to correlate?
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Man, back in my day we didn't have no steenking GPS. LORAN, baby, and you had to map the LPOS numbers from the chains to figure your position in the chart. We finally got an upgraded unit that gave us lat/long, and thought we'd gone to heaven. I'm still convinced that the coxswain "missed" the wave that rolled our 44' MLB all the way over on purpose, because he wanted new electronics.

The longest 40-odd seconds in my life was when I was strapped in, upside down, just off Barnegat Light, NJ, in February, waiting to see if the "self-righting" feature of the MLB was gonna work. I was glad we called it a day and went in after that adventure.
 
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