Runway Course in Route Planner

1st Official Post

    Hi all,

    what does the CRS indication next to a ILS runway mean in the route planner? E.g. when I select KSJC (San Jose) as a destination in the route planner, I see a course (CRS) of 153° for 12R and 12L next to the ILS frequency in the route planner. The actual runway heading / approach course in airport charts is 126°. Similar for 30R and 30L, the route planner shows CRS 333°, the actual runway heading is 306°. On many other airports I checked, the CRS in route planner never really matches the runway heading. Am I misunderstanding sth.?

    Quote from Roberteer

    Hi all,

    what does the CRS indication next to a ILS runway mean in the route planner? E.g. when I select KSJC (San Jose) as a destination in the route planner, I see a course (CRS) of 153° for 12R and 12L next to the ILS frequency in the route planner. The actual runway heading / approach course in airport charts is 126°. Similar for 30R and 30L, the route planner shows CRS 333°, the actual runway heading is 306°. On many other airports I checked, the CRS in route planner never really matches the runway heading. Am I misunderstanding sth.?

    You are not misunderstanding it. In Aerofly FS Global, the CRS shown next to the ILS is the course associated with the ILS/localizer in the navigation database, rather than simply the runway heading shown on the airport charts.

    In the KSJC example, the difference between 153°/333° and the published runway headings is quite significant, so I would treat the CRS shown in the Route Planner as the navigation-database ILS course rather than as the runway heading.

    Thank you, A330. Could you maybe help me and explain the difference between the course associated with the ILS/localizer in the nav. database and the runway heading? When do I use what? So far I always trained ILS landings in the C172 only with the ILS frequency and runway heading published on airport charts and that worked well :)

    Edited once, last by Roberteer (August 18, 2026 at 12:57 AM).

    Thank you, Jan! That might be a potential cause, maybe the deviation is not applied twice but in the wrong direction in the route planner:

    • Magnetic deviation for KSJC is 13° East.
    • True heading of 12R and 12L is 139°.
    • Magnetic heading should thus be 139° minus 13°=126° (subtract East when going from True to Magnetic)
    • Displayed CRS in the route planner is 153° which is close to 139°+13°.