Garmin Tips: Activating a leg

In the IFR world, ATC may occasionally vector a pilot off course for traffic, weather, or other reasons.  Once the deviation is concluded, ATC will direct the pilot to join up with the original course (or a new one in which case you'd use my previous Garmin tip), but that course might not be magenta (active).  The vectors may have taken the aircraft so far away from the active leg that the GPS does not cycle to the next or, even if it does cycle to the next, that isn't the leg you want to fly.

Here's a situation to help clarify the problem and solution: 

You are in Stewart NY and have been cleared to fly via vectors right after takeoff, then to the HUO VOR, the SAX VOR, the STW VOR, and then direct to your destination (westbound).  Here's what that would look like on a chart:

So you take off and ATC gives you vectors for quite a while, all the way past the HUO VOR, placing you just northwest of it.  No worries if you intended to catch the leg between HUO and SAX - the GPS has already cycled to that leg and the airplane is where it appears here:

 But wait!  ATC just cleared you to fly a heading of 180 to intercept the SAX - STW leg and it isn't the active one.  If you pass close enough to SAX for the Garmin to interpret that as "passing" it, then it will cycle in time, but how can you know it will?  With this tip, you'll be able to activate that leg right away and alleviate the worry that you won't be able to navigate on it.  For an added bonus, tell your autopilot to capture the leg by pressing and holding HDG while pressing NAV twice for GPSS capture.  If you don't know about this autopilot trick then either ask your local CSI or just ask me and I'll talk about how it's done. 

So, in our scenario going Direct-To isn't an option because that takes the aircraft directly to the next fix; it wouldn't fly a line between two.  The pilot needs to activate a leg between two waypoints.  Here's how to do that:

1. Push the Flightplan (FPL) button on the Garmin

2. Turn the cursor on and scroll down to the two waypoints which make up the leg you'd like to activate.  In our case, we'd like the leg between SAX and STW to be active.  Put the cursor on the destination of the two, or the bottom of the two as shown here:

 3. There's two ways to do this next bit and it really doesn't matter much which you use.  One method is to push the Direct To button twice, the other is to push Menu.  I'm keen on pushing Menu, so I'll show you what it looks like after you've pressed that button:

4. A screen will come up which says "Fly Leg" and notes your fixes as a double check that you've got the right two.  If it looks like what it should be, push enter and it'll make that leg active.  Don't forget to look at your moving map and make sure the correct leg is now magenta!  It's an easy way to ensure you've done things the right way. 

Time to set up the autopilot to fly a heading with course capture armed!  Now you've taken a situation that would have otherwise been stressful and handled it 10 minutes before you even got to the leg.  Time to focus on what's next... and seeing as how this is New York, what's next is probably 3 more routing changes before you go 50 miles...  Keeps us on our toes, eh?

Safe flying!

-John Fiscus

Chief Pilot

The Flight Academy

www.theflightacademy.com