The room is the sky.
DME6.0FT
CONECRS225
Put a virtual VOR station on your floor and walk around it. Your phone is the aircraft, and the needle, flag and DME show exactly what a real receiver would at that spot. Fifteen minutes of walking teaches what a semester of diagrams doesn’t.
In TestFlight now. Coming to the App Store for iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 or later.
Lesson 1
Place the station on the floor and step back. Wherever you stand is where the aircraft is, and the receiver reads that exact spot: radial, needle, flag and distance.
Walk the arc from the 050 radial to the 030. The needle sweeps from right to left. You crossed radials, and the needle followed you.
Lesson 2
Spin a full circle on the spot. The heading runs all the way round, and the needle, the flag and the DME hold still.
A VOR tells you where you are, never which way you point. On paper that is a rule to memorise. Standing in the room, you watch it happen.
Lesson 3
Set the OBS to 180 and the needle pegs right: the 360 radial lies off to your right. Walk over to it and the needle slides home to the centre, flag TO.
One needle, two ways to move it. Change the course you ask for, or change where you stand.
Lesson 4
Walk inbound. Close to the station you enter the cone of confusion and the flag drops to OFF. Keep going and you come out on the 180 radial, flag FROM.
The DME never reaches zero. It measures slant range, so overhead it reads your phone’s height above the antenna: 3.6 feet when you hold it at chest height.
Lesson 5
Stand still north of the beacon and turn. The ADF needle swings with every degree, because it shows where the station is relative to your nose. Add the heading and you get the bearing to the station.
Scroll to turn the phone. The bearing to the station stays 180.
Set a runway on the kitchen table and fly the approach with the phone. Localizer and glideslope, mile markers along the centreline, an HSI with distance, and a head-up display when you want to look outside.
Lesson 6
The classic VOR questions from the written test, practised until they are easy. An aircraft on a map: which indication does it see? An indication: which aircraft could be yours?
Every answer is computed by the code that drives the receiver in the room, and every wrong answer says why. No floor space needed.
No flight dynamics, no airplane to fly. Position and pointing are the whole model, which is all a VOR, an NDB or an ILS ever knows about you.
Use it before the lesson and before the written test. It doesn’t replace either, and it logs no time.
There is no sign-in, no tracking and no server. Your room stays your room.
No. There are no flight dynamics. Your phone’s position is the aircraft’s position, and its attitude is where it points. The point is to build the mental picture behind each instrument, not to fly an airplane.
About 3 by 3 meters of lit, textured floor for the VOR and NDB rooms. A rug or a wood floor tracks well; a plain glossy floor may not. The tabletop ILS needs a table and a few steps of walking room.
No. Radial AR is a training aid, not an FAA-approved training device, and it makes no logbook claims.
No. The knowledge test practice works anywhere, including on devices without AR. Its answers come from the same math that drives the AR instruments.
Nothing. No account, no analytics, no backend. If you choose true north, location is used once by ARKit to align the room and is never stored or sent.
One email asks for an invite to the beta.
