Flying Visual Approaches? Synthetic Vision Pathways Can Help

Try this Garmin feature and see if it doesn’t bring you out exactly on the visual glidepath to the airport.

Max Trescott

Tuesday, June 03, 2025 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

While working with new Vision Jet pilots, the author found that they typically struggle in two areas. One is flying arrivals, and the other is flying visual approaches. [Courtesy: Max Trescott]

Key Takeaways:

Garmin's "Pathways" feature, though often seen as distracting or increasing pilot workload, has a specific and valuable application for visual approaches.
Pilots frequently struggle with managing altitude during visual approaches, especially when joining the final approach from a long base leg, often resulting in being too high or low.
The effective technique involves loading any vertically-guided approach, activating "vectors to final," and then aiming the Flight Path Marker at the Pathways boxes to acquire the correct visual glidepath.
This method simplifies visual approaches by eliminating complex calculations and works regardless of runway length or the specific point at which the final approach is joined.

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If you’ve flown in a Garmin glass cockpit with synthetic vision, then you may have seen the “Pathways” feature, a series of constantly moving rectangles on the primary flight display (PFD). Candidly, I’ve never liked Pathways, so I was delighted to recently find a good use for them. Best of all, this tip works in any Garmin glass cockpit with Synthetic Vision Pathways technology, so you can use it in anything from a G1000-equipped Cessna 172, up through Cessna business jets with the G3000 and G5000.

The following comes from my Max Trescott’s G1000 and Perspective Glass Cockpit Handbook: