Newbie Question - Aircraft labels

[DazrahT]

Being a railwayman by trade, I am a little lost with one piece of data on the Aircraft labels showing on my map.

Right, I can understand all but one piece of information

[FlightID]
[RegNo] [Aircraft Type]
[Altitude] [+/-??] [Speed]
[Origin] [Destination]

What is the figure shown as [+/-??], at first I thought it was Compass Heading, but I had one plane showing -020, which would be NNE, but the plane concerned was heading in a SSE direction.  I have looked through the manual, and I am surprised that the isn't one page that describes the Aircraft label in detail. (Unless I've overlooked it!)

[DazrahT]

Think I might have worked it out.  Is it the decent/ascent rate?

[Allocator]

This figure is the rate of climb (+) or descent (-) of the aircraft.

You will notice that this figure doesn't appear when an aircraft is level.  A suggestion on the forum here is for up/down arrows instead of +/- as per real radar displays.

[DazrahT]

Many thanks allocator for a quick reply.  I take it that the figure is in ft/sec or mtrs/sec?

[Allocator]

Good question, I'm not entirely sure!

[clayton4115]

its "fpm"

feet per minute, i should i know i like flying the 777 on Flight Simulator! lol

[DazrahT]

Cheers Clayton

[RodBearden]

Hate to be pedantic, but surely its 100's of feet per minute. so -012 will be a descent of 1200fpm?

Rod

[Storm]

Hate to be pedantic, but surely its 100's of feet per minute. so -012 will be a descent of 1200fpm?

Rod

Correct -012 is 1200 Feet Per Minute and going down.

[testmonkey]

....and it can be a little disconcerting when the figure is being reported incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago I watched the descent figure for a Monarch 757 rapidly increase to over 4500fpm before it vanished from the display at around 12000ft (well within the range I'd normally still see it).

Certainly had me monitoring the news channels / web and scanning as many atc frequencies as possible for a little while afterwards :)

[clayton4115]

thats quite normal, if ATC has informed the pilot to expedite the descent, the plane can go into a steep dive up to 6000 fpm if the pilot wanted to even more

so i dont think it was an error showing on RB.

[testmonkey]

Seemed strange at the time though - early hours of the morning, virtually no traffic around and the aircraft was well over 100 miles from its destination so no rush to get down unless unseen traffic was in conflict. The ground speed also went up to over 600kts as well.