A guy was once explaining to me about his “beautiful panel” and I responded that my then-Luscombe had a beautiful panel too, and that it was an art deco design painted red, kind of a dark shade to match the stripes on the exterior of the plane. It did have a venturi powered turn-and-bank but the most useful part of that was the non-gyro slip ball, given that a Luscombe is very much a rudder plane. Mine was BTW flown across the US coast-to-coast twice and no puppies were injured. The radio was a battery powered Icom portable from the 80s that worked well for pilot controlled and Class D airports, plugged in to an external antenna. I made a bracket to hang it on the passenger door post. Since the plane never had a generator, nor a vacuum pump, nor a battery, no installed avionics or additional gyro instruments were fitted or needed.
After I learned to fly in it without issue and owned it for I think 17 years, that plane was BTW wrecked by a senior United Airlines captain, half way through its third trip from coast to coast, one week after I sold it to him. He might’ve been a little more cognizant of the need to learn to fly and land with appropriate use of your feet while looking out the window to do so. As he left he explained to me how proficient he was, that he’d never bent metal in a million years, etc etc, and that the 73 year old plane was safe with him. In the real world a few days later, this was the result of his apparently misplaced priorities, from the local newspaper report.
My current plane has an artificial horizon, DG and T&B, normal 6 pack stuff but really the only time I’ve used them for any practical purpose was when doing ‘just in case’ training hood work. I only fly it within about a 500 mile radius (3.5 hrs out and the same back) and don’t fly in clouds, I’ve never done so once. I still pay close attention to keeping the ball centered, the importance of which was made clear to me in my long ago Luscombe training. In that plane you could noticeably kill the climb rate with only half a ball out.
My present aircraft has good gyro instruments, but the Jodel DR1050s I did most of my hours in did not
The last one had no AI and no DI. I flew 1,000 hours in her with no problems, watching the weather from the window.
I flew Barra to Oban low, with 2000’ cloudbase, to see the breaking wave crests for a horizon.
I had to turn back in bright sunshine with no horizon, as I reached the west coast.
My scares were in the previous Jodel, with an occasional DI problem and sluggish AH and Turn.
A Group member and his wife were killed in her when they got into cloud.
No gyro is better than poor gyro.
gallois wrote:
Ha ha many of us old club dinosaurs did our PPLs without AI or DI including the cross country navs and diversions.
I am one of them. No AI, no DI, one old VOR and a radio. No transponder either. C150, HB-CSF. That’s VFR! The horizon is out there, if it is not, you don’t fly.
Nowadays it is really easy to get an AI and DI. I know a Jodel with a VFR Aspen, they put it when one of the old gyros failed as they needed it for PPL basic training. Cheaper than 2 conventional ones plus vaccum pump and all the wiring.
If I go fly with a plane which does not have an AI, I take my trusty Dynon D2. Today it would be a D3.
