Originally Posted by higney85:1340264
Originally Posted by
Trip7
At XJT we are taught to just follow the snowflake. The snowflake respects your most restrictive crossing fix
The snowflake represents the next altitude in the FMS. That may not be the ideal situation with multiple step downs on an rnav.
Both the banana bar and snowflake work, but the OP is asking about the way to see it all at once. Dir/INTC shows that.
The snowflake allows you to descend to a hard altitude at a constant 3 degree slope and meet all soft altitude windows. Some places like DCA the snowflake disappears after passing a fix during the descent which simply means to level off.
My ODP arrival briefing is simple and well.... brief. I will descend to the hard altitudes using the snowflake. Once I hit the TOD the snowflake appears, and I divide my ground speed by 2 to get my intial decent rate. I tweak it from there to follow the snowflake.