Communicating a FMS Peculiarity

This post is intended to communicate a very specific behavior of the R9 FMS that has existed from initial certification/release.  We don't know of anyone actually experiencing this behavior in the field but wanted to communicate it as a FYI kind of posting.

If a runway is entered in the appropriate FMS FPL page field before an arrival is entered and the runway does not belong to the arrival, the arrival is not accepted.  This will appear to the user as if the FMS is ignoring your input and won't tell you why.

This can be avoided by ensuring an arrival is entered first or by deleting the runway, had it been entered in prior to the arrival.

If you wanted to reproduce this to see for yourself, a good example is:

Enter waypoint UNKL
Enter runway 11
Enter arrival GO2E

Note that the arrival was not entered.

For those of you who can't get enough of the inner logic workings of the R9 FMS, the design here is that GO2E is a runway dependent STAR, dependent on runway 29.

The R9 FMS is currently only inserting the two legs of the BZ transition and ignoring the common segment. Then, because the STAR is not applicable to runway 11, it deletes the runway. When the runway gets deleted, it deletes that part of the STAR that is runway dependent. In this case, that turns out to be the entire STAR.

Edited by AviJake - 23 Apr 2012 at 9:01am