VOR Sim — a VOR and NDB radio navigation trainer for iPhone and iPad

A VOR and NDB radio navigation trainer for iPhone and iPad. Fly the needles, not a menu.

Radio navigation clicks when you fly it, not when you read about it. VOR Sim puts a light flight model behind a full six-pack panel, a moving map, a synthetic outside view and a GNS 430-style GPS, so the needles stay the thing you have to concentrate on. Nothing to configure, no aircraft to buy, no scenery to download: press START and intercept something.

The panel

Classic VOR head (NAV1) with a rotatable OBS ring, CDI and TO/FROM flag
HSI (NAV2) with course needle, deviation bar, heading bug and an ADF pointer
Twin-needle ADF — tune two NDBs and cross their bearings for a fix
The ADF card is fixed, slaved to the compass (RMI) or set by hand — turn its knob, or just drag the card round by its rim
A directional gyro that precesses about 10° in 15 minutes and has to be reset
Airspeed with an RPM sub-dial, attitude, altimeter with hPa subscale, VSI and turn coordinator
Spread two fingers and the nav heads take the whole screen — on a phone, the only way to read half a dot
The row of switches under the panel decides which heads are up: V2 steps HSI → plain second VOR head → off, ADF two needles → one → off

Real navaids

About 17 000 airports and 10 000 VOR and NDB stations, bundled and offline. Positions, idents, frequencies and runway directions are real
Long press a VOR to tune it on NAV1 then NAV2; an NDB goes to the first ADF needle, then the second
Long press an airport to fly direct to it
A reset deals a fresh exercise; switch on "Reset moves you somewhere new" and it deals a fresh place too — a real aerodrome anywhere in the world with real VORs in range of it

The map

Your aircraft, its breadcrumb trail and every station, all draggable — build an intercept in seconds and drag the aeroplane back to fly it again
The selected OBS course drawn through each VOR, with TO/FROM arrows and radial numbers pinned to the screen edge
A second press takes the ground away and leaves the stations, radials, track and airspace on black, which is how a radial reads easiest

Flying it

Tilt the device like a yoke — tilt is elevator, rotate is ailerons — or use the on-screen stick, rudder and throttle. Hardware keyboards work too
Controls are damped the way an aeroplane is: an input arrives over about a second, and the turn builds after it
A turn costs: 1.4 g at 45° of bank. Either the nose falls or the speed goes. The wing stalls at 46 kt, and with aileron on it spins
Engine sound synthesised from the rpm, wind with gusts, 1–4× time compression, and a stopwatch for timing a hold

Out of the window

The cockpit view has three settings. Look out over the cowling, which is the attitude reference in a real aeroplane — in level flight the horizon sits just above the nose, and where it sits is your pitch. Or switch to the glass panel: the nose goes, and a horizon, a pitch ladder every 10°, a bank scale and boxed speed, height and climb are painted on the window instead, so the view can be flown on its own. Or close it. The ground below is the real countryside, from the map.

GNS 430

Direct-To, a flight plan with automatic leg sequencing, OBS suspend, CDI source switching between GPS and VLOC, COM and NAV tuning, and any bundled ident typed in with a match list from the database.

Support

Questions, bug reports and suggestions go to arnulf.keese@gmail.com. Say which device and which version of the app you are on — the version is at the foot of the Help page inside the app — and what the needles were doing at the time.

The training area centres on your position, or on EDAZ Schönhagen if you decline the location prompt. Nothing else is asked of you: see the privacy policy.

Privacy, in one line

No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no third-party SDKs, and no data collected. One home airfield is remembered on your device; the map tiles come from Apple. The full policy spells it out.