ICAO Presentation on Converting to True North Navigation 

I'm not saying true north flight plans are nessesarily good or bad , but there is really no need for all the magnetic problems listed; most of them are caused by incorrect application rather than being inherent to magnetic navigation. Though the need for pilots to figure and apply variation adjustment in the middle of an emergency so they can use the backup compass is exactly the wrong place to add workload. It is the antithesis of aviation safety culture where we do extra work of those conversions during planning to prevent such issues while flying. Switching to true north flight plans won't alter the need to have a magnetic course included on navlogs nor will it reduce the need for ATC to be able to and proficient in magnetic vectoring. General use of true north will however reduce practice and familiarity. Clearly these nav systems are being incompetently managed by a herd of bureaucrats if they have those track misalignment steps. I have substantial background in navigation, software, and aviation with some instrument proceedure development and radio broadcast engineering too. This is clearly a case of applying the magnetic conversion at the wrong step. Examples: An ILS/localizer is a fixed signal aligned with the runway there is absolutely no involvement with cardinal directions true or magnetic, you could uproot the whole airport turn it 90 degrees and set it back down with no need to realign the ILS. A fix or waypoint is a fixed to a geographic point on the ground and the course between fixes is geometry completely independent of cardinal direction. VOR radials have a set published variation. Usually, and should be, rounded to whole degrees. While the receiver shows the radial approximating the magnetic course as a cross reference sanity check, the radial number is not an actual magnetic bearing. A VOR radial is geographically fixed and uses a simple offset from true north. (Canada's 2⁰ realignment requirement is a self inflicted problem, no sympathy from me, the USA has been succesfully using ±5⁰ for VOR magnetic-radial deviation for many decades so realignment and alterations to charts tend to run a 20-50 year cycle. As stated in the video compass nav is a ±10⁰ level of precision.) Radials follow great circles anyway so the cardinal direction will change enroute whether using true or magnetic course estimates, an FMS should be using spherical geometry not simple bearings. (They are course estimates because the primary navigation is the physical VOR signal, or GPS track overlaying that VOR signal, not the cardinal bearing corrosponding to the signal.) As such the track misalignment in a given FMS is simply bad programming and incompetent management by the vendor, and this sort of incompetence will not be fixed by switching everyone's fight plans to be true north based, because the navigation systems and flight director should already be using geometric tracks between points which makes steps and misalignment jumps mathamatically impossible. Only displaying a conversion to magnetic bearing/course which is made at the vary end. In other words they treated the course lines at the proceedure/airway building block and defining the ends as waypoints, when they should be using waypoints as the fundamental course building block and then connecting the dots.