Why is this Update Necessary?
Voyager, and probably every other piece of software that plans flights, calculates magnetic variation based on data tables provided by NOAA. As you probably know, magnetic variation is not constant but varies not only by location but also over time. Therefore, these tables, which provide magnetic variation for every point on Earth for any given day, are valid for just five years, after which they need to be updated to provide accurate results. The last such update was valid from January 1, 2005 until December 31, 2009 and, therefore, depending on when you read this, has already or will shortly, expire. The new data, valid from January 1, 2010 until December 31, 2014, was released by NOAA on December 15, 2009 so we had very little time (given the holidays) to integrate the data. This update incorporates the revised data.
Anything Else in the Update?
YES! Although it's probably overshadowed by the magnetic variation issue, this update includes a feature we've been working on for a long time: IFR Low Altitude and High Altitude scanned charts that cover not only the lower 48 states (as the current charts do) but also cover Alaska, the Caribbean (including almost all of Mexico and even Central and South America above the equator), and the Pacific including Hawaii (High Altitude only).
To access these new charts, you can either use the Chart Viewer within Voyager or the new Data Manager introduced recently. In both cases, you'll notice new items in the lists of IFR Low Altitude and High Altitude charts. Specifically, you'll see a series of chart names that incorporate an A (for Alaska), a C (for Caribbean) or P (Pacific) in their names. These are the new charts. Like all the other charts in Voyager, you can see them in either a static form (just like a paper chart) or on the main chart window in seamless bits.
One caveat: We had planned to introduce these new charts in a few weeks. As of this writing, two charts are not yet geo-referenced as well as we require so they are not available for download. They are HA02 (High Alt, Alaska west of Bethel) and HP01 (High Alt, Pacific except for Hawaii). If you try to download these charts, you'll get an error that the chart is not yet available. We expect these to be available within a week or two. In addition, we will be enhancing the resolution of some of the charts in the future.
A Note About WACs
We've been slowly transitioning away from providing WACs (World Area Charts) for the past year. These charts, while useful for paper planning very long flights, serve very little purpose given Voyager's seamless Sectional charts that cover the same area in more detail. In other words, the seamless Sectionals could be thought of as being one gigantic WAC (or, more accurately, one gigantic Sectional) that covers the whole country.
Therefore, we have not been updating the data recently. Now that we've introduced the new IFR coverage areas (Alaska, Caribbean, Pacific) which covers a vastly larger geographic area than the old WAC coverage, we'll begin removing WAC support entirely from Voyager. In this release, we've disabled support for automatic downloading of WAC charts via Voyager's Chart Viewer or the new Data Manager. You can still view WACs already downloaded and manually download (outdated) WACs for a short time before the WAC tab is removed entirely.
