Route and Legs

🇮🇱 עברית

Route and legs

Structure

A route is waypoints plus the legs between them. There is always exactly one fewer leg than waypoints — adding, inserting or deleting a waypoint re-syncs the legs automatically.

Building

• First click on an empty map starts the route and arms add-mode, but only while the "click a point on the map to start a route" hint is up. Once you have learned the app, a plain click inspects instead of dropping a point.
• Add mode (Edit menu, or A) keeps adding on each click. The mode chip shows what is happening and stops it.
• Search — type space-separated codes (LLHZ BAZRA DEROR) and press Enter to build a whole route at once.
• Templates — Charts → Templates for a ready-made route.
• Split a leg — drag its midpoint, and the new waypoint inherits the leg's speed.

Extending a route continues at the speed already being flown, rather than resetting to the default.

Every way of adding a point builds the same route. A click in Add mode, the search box, an inspector's Add to route (on a chart point, an airfield or a spot held on the map), the right-click menu, the phone's long-press Add and Direct to all go through one add: a spot without a name snaps to the published point under it, a zero-length leg or a third pass over the same leg is refused, the frequency changes are added and the published corridor is filled in. LLHZ BAZRA DEROR SHARO comes out the same — with the Pluto West change at DEROR — whichever way it is built.

Following the published corridors

On the CVFR layer, adding a reporting point can extend the route along the published corridor from the previous point instead of drawing a straight line. The corridor's points are spliced in as ordinary waypoints — delete one and only that point goes, exactly like any other.

Toggled from the toolbar and persisted. It is inert off the CVFR layer, and between two points the graph does not know: a tap in open country still draws a direct line.

Two kinds of segment are never chosen for you:

Army airways	not available to a civil flight at all
ATC-approval corridors	opened only by a real-time clearance

Neither will be spliced in, even when it is the shortest way round — and neither can appear in a filed plan (see Submit a flight plan). They are not hidden: both stay on the map with their altitudes, and a point you place yourself is always kept, because corridor-filling only ever adds between the points you drew. Flying one is yours to arrange on frequency; it is only the app's own choice that is constrained.

Corridors the data marks as closed or time-gated are avoided when an open alternative exists, and used with a warning when none does — a hint never makes a published route unfileable.

Low Alt routes carry the chart's route types. 55 of the 87 LSA legs are classified by their colour on the chart: weekday (green, 15), weekend — Fri/Sat (brown, 17) and special (magenta, 23). A weekday plan is not routed through a weekend leg; when there is no other way, the planner falls back to the full network and warns. The chart's dashed by controller approval only legs (5) are never filled in for you, like the ATC-approval corridors above. The other 32 legs are not legible on the chart and carry no type.

What NavAid computes per leg

Value	How
Distance	Great-circle, in nautical miles
True course	Degrees from true north
Magnetic course	True course corrected by the magnetic variation in force — automatic from the World Magnetic Model (5°E over Israel) or the manual value (Settings)
ETE	distance ÷ speed — nothing else
Fuel	ETE × gallons-per-hour (see Fuel)

Vertical speed never changes leg time. Entering a climb rate shapes the profile picture only; climb time is carried as a separate allowance rather than smeared into a leg, so the map kites, the plan, the totals and the nav log cannot disagree. The forecast wind does not change it either — planning time is TAS-based.

A leg with no altitude is flown level for timing, and drawn dashed on the profile with a "no altitude set" caption so an assumed height never reads as a flown one.

Editing

In the inspector — select a leg for speed, inbound/outbound altitude, and (with terrain + Show MSA) its safe altitude. See Inspector.

In the Flight Plan — the table is editable per leg: From/To names, speed, altitude. Available columns are From, To, Hdg, Dist, Speed, Alt, Time, Fuel, Cumulative time, Cumulative fuel, Radial, DME, Freq; the Columns menu chooses which are shown, and a phone shows a narrower default set.

There is no per-leg free-text note. To annotate a leg, add a note to the map or an identification point anchored to the leg (see Waypoints and Notes).

On the map

• A line between the waypoints, with an arrow for direction.
• An out-and-back leg is drawn as two lines — one a few pixels either side of the shared track, each with its own kites, so the outbound and the return read apart instead of printing on top of each other. Only the one pair is separated: a track is flown twice at most (see How often a track may be flown), so there is never a third line to place. Selecting is unchanged — press the kite, not the line. Choose a single direction in 🧭 Route direction and the pair collapses back to one line down the middle, since nothing is overlapping any more. Turn the whole thing off with splitRetracedLegs, or change the gap with retracedLegOffsetPx (5 px), both in the tuning panel's Route line group.
• Leg kite — heading / time / altitude, per leg.
• Cumulative kite — running time. Its tip points at the waypoint it counts to, and its default offset clears that waypoint's circle. A leg inside the departure field's CTR draws no cumulative kite: it is flown on the field's procedure, not the route's stopwatch.
• Minute ticks along the leg, from the planned speed.
• Drift lines and distance badges are toggles in the Map menu.

Turning point

Where the sortie turns for home. NavAid needs to know because an out-and-back is one flight — and above all because that is how it is filed.

• The route proves it when a leg flies back down a track already flown — the first such leg is the turn, and everything from there on is the return. On A → B → A the route turns at B and nowhere else, so there is nothing to choose: the inspector on B says "↻ Turning point — the route doubles back here" and offers no button, and every other waypoint on that route says where the turn is. A proven turn cannot be moved or cleared — clearing it would leave a route that visibly doubles back with no turn at all.
• You mark it when nothing retraces. A loop repeats no leg, so the geometry has nothing to say: select the far waypoint and use ↻ Mark as turning point in its inspector. The line under the button then reads "you marked this", so a marked point never looks like an unmarked one. One per route; marking another moves it, and pressing the marked one again clears it.

Proof outranks a mark. A mark made while the route was a loop stops deciding anything the moment an edit makes the route double back — the retraced leg does.

The mark is offered only on a route that comes home — one whose first and last waypoints are the same airfield. A route that lands somewhere else has no return to separate from its outbound, so the button is dimmed and says so. Clearing an existing mark stays available, so a route edited into a one-way trip is not left holding one nothing can use.

Filing an out-and-back

In Submit Flight Plan the turn is what makes the sortie one plan rather than two:

• Where the drawn route ends at the turn and the way home is a separate saved route, the dialog offers it under Return route and joins the two. The join must be a real turnaround — the return has to start exactly where the outbound ended, or the plan is refused rather than describing a path never flown. In the joined sequence the turn point appears once, and the plan lands at the return route's final point.
• The filed plan keeps running totals for the whole sortie — a filing desk wants the round trip, not two halves. (The cumulative clock on the map restarts at the turn, where what matters is how long until you are back.)
• It names the flight. A loop saved as LLHZ → LLHZ tells you nothing, so the turn goes into the suggested route name and into every exported filename — LLHZ-via-Tel-Yona. That is what keeps two sorties out of the same field apart in the saved list, in the downloads folder, and in the return picker itself.

On the map

On an out-and-back sortie both directions draw their own kites, and near the far end they land on top of each other — readable on screen where you can zoom, unusable on a printed map. 🧭 Route direction (Map) draws one direction at a time: both, outbound only, or return only. Only the kites and their cumulative arrows are filtered; the route line, distance badges and drift lines always stay, so the printed track is whole.

With no turning point the picker is disabled and reads Outbound only — the whole route is outbound, and nothing is hidden. With no route at all it reads Both and is disabled: an empty map has no outbound half either, and leaving it set meant the next route started with half its legs hidden by a filter nobody chose. Clear map puts the stored choice back to Both for the same reason.

A turning point also changes two other things on the map:

• No frequency change is called there — and none can be added. The far point is often a real comm-change point, but you leave on the frequency you arrived on, so the callout would be a radio call you never make. None is seeded, Add frequency change is dimmed with that reason on it, and the Z key adds nothing. Dimmed rather than removed: a control that vanishes moves every button under it, including the one being pressed.
• Reverse route and show-return-path are switched off. The route already contains its return, so reversing renumbers the same sortie and mirroring it draws an imaginary second one.

How often a track may be flown

A track is flown twice at most — once each way. That is what the map can draw honestly: the out-and-back split places exactly one pair of lines, and a third pass would land on a line already there, with the same kites and the same numbers on top of it.

A sortie may retrace as many legs as it likes doing this. LLHZ SFAIM TYONA NTAIM YAVNE ZASHD turning for home and coming back up the same reporting points to HTZUK KNTRY LLHZ retraces three legs on one turn, and is a perfectly ordinary route.

The route builder holds you to it in the two places a route grows:

• Add-mode tap — on the chart or on a waypoint already in the route. A tap that would fly a track a third time adds nothing and says why.
• A typed route — LLHZ RIDNG LLHZ RIDNG is rejected before it replaces what is on the map, so a bad query costs nothing.

Routes saved before this rule still load and draw: the limit is on building, not on what the app will open.

The profile of a saved route

Every route in the Saved routes library has a Profile button that draws it in place — altitude and planned speed against distance, with the terrain underneath — without loading it over the route you are working on. Checking was that the one I planned at 3500? used to cost you your working route, or a save first.

Planned speed, not ground speed: it is the only speed a saved route carries, and a route saved months ago has no wind to correct by. It is drawn as a step, because a leg is flown at one speed and changes at the waypoint — a sloped line would draw an acceleration nobody planned — and a leg with no speed set draws no claim at all.

⤢ opens the strip larger, over the map, showing whatever the panel is showing.

A key names each line, and ⤓ PNG saves the picture: the browser's download in a browser, the system share sheet on a phone, redrawn at export size with the route's name and its totals across the top.

Saved routes and recordings sit in separate frames, with a Show dropdown to narrow the library to one or the other.

See also

• Waypoints and Notes · Flight Plan · Inspector · The Map