Despite watching many tutorials, I've never been able to get a flight plan to work with LNAV and VNAV. This is on the stock 737 included in X-Plane 11.

So I thought maybe I can just enter a single GPS coordinate and fly directly to that. When I enter a GPS coordinate (for example N45W050, for N 45° W 50°), I get the error "NO WPT". Please see my steps in the images below. What am I doing wrong?

I think you are entirely expecting too much from the default 737 and it´s FMS. It does not offer the same functionality that the real aircraft offers.

You may have more luck with the (free) Zibo Mod to the default 737. It is akin to the FBW A320 NEO mod in MSFS in scope.

1 hour ago, Janov said:

You may have more luck with the (free) Zibo Mod to the default 737. It is akin to the FBW A320 NEO mod in MSFS in scope

Light years better.

Thanks for the tip. I'll bite the bullet and install the Zibo

On 3/10/2022 at 10:29 PM, WyomingFlyer33 said:

So I thought maybe I can just enter a single GPS coordinate and fly directly to that. When I enter a GPS coordinate (for example N45W050, for N 45° W 50°), I get the error "NO WPT". Please see my steps in the images below. What am I doing wrong?

There's several ways you can do that.

You could make a user-defined waypoint if you wanted to refer to those coordinates by a name. That's what you do on the define pilot waypoint page. 

Start by entering the coordinates into the scratchpad, and then line-select them into LL3 (latitude and longitude) 

Then, give your point a name (I chose "MYWPT1") and line-select that into LL1 (ident). You can then line-select LL6 to store the waypoint permanently under that name.

You can now refer to this point in your flightplan under that name, here for example by entering it on the LEGS page:

 

You can also enter the coordinates directly on the LEGS page, bypassing the "define pilot waypoint" stage:

You can tell it's the same waypoint as they are 0.0 nautical miles apart. You can also use the shorthand notation with no minutes, just full degrees.

 

Finally, you can also use the ICAO notation, 4550N (more information here: http://www.jeppesen.com/download/navdata/navdata_info1.pdf on page 3)

 

As you can see, there are many ways you can use the default FMS to navigate to a coordinate pair.

I thought I would share something that I have learned regarding the entry of user-defined waypoints in the default FMS in X Plane 737. The format for Latitude/Longitude is displayed in the FMS (LSK 3) as allowing two decimal places for minutes. For precision, two decimal places are required and in charts, minutes are often specified to two decimal places, for example ­­­N53 27.81/W113 24.91. However, entering the second decimal place for minutes in the scratch pad except when it is zero, always results in a rejection of the entered value when the line select key for latitude/longitude is pressed. When the second decimal place value is omitted from the scratchpad entry, the waypoint can be successfully stored

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-6vlHspoX1Nx1Bkz93zyPjhHX-s-Ij3k/view?usp=sharing 

 

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-0__EY5EuO9IASE5p1zCzfOlogwV547T/view?usp=sharing

Practically, rounding to the nearest one tenth of a minute can result in a positional error of 100 meters approximately, which for a flight simulator may not matter so much. Note that greater precision is possible when custom waypoints (or published waypoints that are not included in the default database) are added directly in the user_fix.dat file.