VOR Navigation

Flight #: 090 [Commercial VFR61]
CFI: Kristie E.
Aircraft: Robinson R22
Aircraft ID: N856HA
Duration, as PIC: 1.5hrs
Cumulative Time: 109.9hrs

As I'm starting my IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) training, today we did a bit of VOR Navigation. Put simply, a VOR is a radio beacon that broadcasts very focused signals radially out from the center at 1º intervals. Think of spokes on a wheel. The VOR below is south of Hillsboro airport and is named the "Newberg VOR". You can see the center of the blue circle is a box. That is the VOR itself. The blue "clock dial" around the VOR helps you determine the radials that are projected by the VOR. The blue line, pointing NNE is the 0º/360º radial... or magnetic north. Anyway, draw a line from your position to the center of the VOR dot... calculate the º on the VOR... you are on that radial. SO, draw a line from HIO to UBG, you will see that we would be on the 346º radial. Make sense?

Now, it is a little more complicated that that... but not much. Draw a line, perpendicular to the radial you are on, through the center of the VOR. In the diagram below, you will see a red side and a green side. Now, say we want to fly from Hillsboro to the VOR. Since we know we are on the 346º radial... we actually want to fly over the VOR, therefore we want to be 180º off of the radial we are on... on the other side. 346º - 180º = 166º. So, we want to get to the 166º radial.

To use a VOR for navigation you dial in the frequency, 117.4, into your navigation radio, and then look at the instrument. If you were sitting at Hillsboro, tuned in the Newberg VOR (UBG), you might see something like this. The little knob to the lower left actually rotates the compass dial. The vertical line in the middle is ligned up dead center. The arrow is pointing to the radial we want to go to... and the tail is pointing to the radial we are currently on.

Now, in our specific example, we are North of the VOR.
If you split the VOR in half, perpendicular to the radial you are on... If you are on the red side, you are on the FROM side of the VOR. On the green? Then you are on the TO side. Think of it like this... the arrow points TO or FROM the VOR.


So... our indicaor actually would look like this:

We are on the 346º radial of the Newberg VOR, pointed to the 166º radial on the other side of the VOR. If we follow this course... we will cross right over the center of the VOR.

Using this logic, we can fly to/from the VOR to get anyplace... we just have to decide what radial we are on... and which radial our destination is on. There are VORs all over the place... so this is a really handy way to fly.

For my flight, we left HIO, headed to UBG, then to a private airport called Mach-O. About 15nm west of McMinneville (Town / Airport).


Here is what we did...
166º TO (To the Newberg VOR)

220º FROM (To Mach-O)













We then headed north just to explore a bit.


Once we were ready to head back, we dialed in:

244º TO (To Newberg VOR)













345º FROM (To HIO)













Pretty simple once you know the rules, eh?