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My thought is some combination of that and magnetic deviation.

Runway headings are always magnetic headings, so what the runway says and what GPS calculates (at the lowest levels) are two different things.

So maybe the issue only occurs at airports where you’re landing on 27 AND mag deviation is some specific value?

Would explain why it happens at only some US and some S. American airports:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_declination#/media/...




> Runway headings are always magnetic headings...

This is incorrect, while most runways are aligned with the magnetic heading, that changes when you have a field with multiple parallel runways. Atlanta Hartsfield comes to mind first, with its five parallels in the East-West directions, 8L/26R, 8R/26L, 9L/27R, 9R/27L, 10/28. One would naively expect these to be not parallel by just reading the name, while in fact they are all in line.


Okkkk, good point.

And they're only magnetic until they get updated because the declination changes over time.

Other exceptions: near the poles where the magnetic declinations change rapidly, so they use something else.




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