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On a real world flight test where the examiner did not want me to use the gps he set it to display one of the informational pages not having guidance information e.g one of the aux or nearest pages. You can do that in the sim too.

Having said that these days one is expected to make use of all navigation equipment; it is good practice to cross check independent sources whichever you are treating as primary.

There are still a few around who frown on gps.

Quick question for Keith - in your cross-country videos you said that you are a fan of using the cross-track error on the GPS for high-precision flying e.g. knowing your exact deviation in feet from a localiser rather than using the needle. On the Laminar 530 it doesn't look you can customise the pages and instead you can only have estimated time, track versus desired track etc.

Can you confirm if that's the case i.e. you cannot customise the pages in X-Plane like you have in your Lancair in real life?

Off-topic - just got to the end of my trial period and have signed up for the year. Having an absolute ball. Thanks for the service.

You are correct. The X-plane 430/530 does not allow the user to change any of the data fields that you can change on the real units.

Bob, correct. The Laminar 530 is lacking in that regard (as Andrew says above). You'd need the Reality XP Garmin 430/530 (which uses the Garmin Trainer software under the covers) to get access to that functionality.

For those wondering which page to swap to, the lower right knob on the Garmin has an outer knob and inner knob. The inner knob moves through the pages of the current function. The large knob moves through different functions. Go to the VNAV page (last page of the NAV chapter), that should result in very little course guidance

Good to know about RealityXP. Will look into it. Does that play nicely with Navigraph and updated data etc if it uses the Garmin Trainer Software? I tried the trainer software outside of X-Plane a while back and it was way out of date without an obvious way to update it. Entirely possible that I didn't look hard enough.

No, it doesn't play nicely at all, unfortunately. You're at the mercy of the Garmin trainer nav database, which is whatever data was current at the time the trainer was released. There are methods for getting the latest navdata in there, but I'm not familiar with them.

Thanks. I'll give that a miss then. For me the X-plane 430/430 and Garmin 1000 are enough for me and I'd rather have the recent data than perfect control over the data fields. Also really enjoying the Dynon and 750/650 in the Aerobask planes now that the touchscreens work in VR.