This kind of reminds me of the Denial among pilots thread thread
Some people get a real kick out of doing basic navigation well, much in the same way some people get a kick out of doing crosswords or Sudoku. But some people just have ingrained dogma, and won’t see things done a different way.
I’ve been chastised by instructors for using permanent markers as opposed to Chinagraph pencils. I’ve been given really serious grief for using an egg timer as opposed to a mechanical analogue stopwatch, and then attempted to explain (it has to be said in complete vain) why something with hundreds of moving parts might not be more reliable than something with no moving parts.
Personally, I subscribe to what next’s perspective. I like flying, and in a manner consistent with the rest of my life endeavours, I strive to pick the best tools which enable me to do that task as well as I am able. If I have to do a load of sums, I use a spreadsheet. I don’t use a pen and paper, mental arithmetic and long division. Yes, every now and again, I might do a long division by hand and remind myself (and perhaps marvel at how) it works. But I don’t kid myself that it is a useful method for doing things efficiently – it’s a last resort. If my spreadsheet fails, I’ll fall back on it.
Much in the same I’ll fall back on dead reckoning if the GPS / VOR/DME, ADF fails. I’d much rather use the extra capacity GPS moving map gives me, to keep a better lookout and a host of other things conducive to a safe flight.
I don’t have any quibble with that, except that I’m not sure I could stay current enough at dead-reckoning to depend on it in case of a GPS failure, unless I also practiced it regularly. Perhaps if I’d got a lot of experience from pre-GPS days it wouldn’t be such an issue. For my own flying I prefer to practice the hard technique and keep the easy technique in reserve, rather than the other way round.
A lot probably depends on where you fly – in Wales there are lots of landmarks and little airspace. Round London I really wouldn’t like to fly without GPS.
For my own flying I prefer to practice the hard technique and keep the easy technique in reserve, rather than the other way round
Have to disagree here. It’s essential that you really know your kit. Starting to learn to operate a 530 a few miles from the LHR zone inbound is, errrrr, not such a good plan. IMHO DR should be the fallback of last resort. It is for me.
I don’t think anyone was suggesting departing from say Fairoaks or White Waltham and using this as their first time to acquaint themselves with their new GPS. Any more than they would suggest learning DR under the same circumstances.
So, just out of interest, do you apply the same principles (eschew simpler, less error prone methods in preference to more taxing, more error prone methods) to an other of your life endeavours?
Do you do all your tax returns by hand, just in case the calculator/spreadsheet stops working one day?
This is a genuine question!
If the above was addressed at me: I use the best tools (and people in the tax return scenario) available. And for aerial navigation that’s not DR.
Is it practical? Yes for modest trips up to 300 nm, but that is a function of the eighty knotter context.
Bugger only 300nm, in 2002 I flew coast to coast in a Cessna 140 (some of it with a failed dynamo and no electrical system – you have to do what you have to do when you’re in the middle of nowhere) using just pilotage and dead reckoning. My flight planning was: look to see where the weather was good in the general direction I wanted to go, scribble a line on the chart and go. The aircraft didn’t even have a DG let alone a VOR receiver. It totaled around 4000nm of flying when all was said and done.
There’s no need to be completely anal about the calculations. I used the old WWII-era mechanical clock in the C140’s panel and used 1.5 miles per minute using my fingers against the tick marks on the longitude lines (which are all 1nm apart) if I needed to measure anything in flight. I flew good honest headings. I used VOR roses on the charts to estimate the ground track of the line I drew.
It wasn’t just that flight either, we did a flight from Houston to Oshkosh and back (including bad weather diversions) using pilotage & dead reckoning as a formation flight of two vintage Cessnas.
It is immensely satisfying to navigate a cross country well using nothing but time, distance, and looking out the window. Eventually you get practised enough at it that you have a “built in GPS in your head”. I could look at some feature on the ground and instantly pick it out on the chart.
Of course today I use Skydemon a lot but from time to time I’ll do a cross country by time, distance, a VFR chart and looking out the windows.
DR is pretty easy if you are cunning in your choice of landmarks and/or are flying over feature-rich terrain.
I am certain that most “lost” scenarios are caused by a false positive identification of a ground feature which has a “twin brother” (a twin sister if you are a girl pilot 
) a couple of miles away. Then, you don’t realise you have screwed up until you fail to find the next feature and then it’s too late because backtracking will throw in more errors.
Some “lost” scenarios are caused by forgetting to start / stop / wind up the stopwatch, and I have done that many times, including on my JAA IR test…
I know some people that are flying around using death reckoning techniques, and some are quite good at it.
They treat it like a black art, spending hours studying the map, drawing lines on it with a pencil, measuring using a ruler and protractor, calculating drift using a E6B, etc.
When I see them at work, I feel a bit uneasy when I check the weather on my phone, get into the aircraft, enter the flight plan, and start flying
If death reckoning would be the way to go, airliners would certainly use it, right?
Below some reasons why I think DR is not very useful:
- You need good conditions
- You can’t fly above clouds
- High workload in compare to modern nav methods.
- Uncomfortable, since visual flights are mostly done at a low level
- Not accurate enough to navigate complex airspace.
- Unreliable, as it relies on human interpretation
- Planning the flight takes more time
- Not really usable for night flying
- Doesn’t work when flying over featureless terrain (snow covered areas, forests, etc etc).
- Doesn’t work well for a high performance aircraft (things simply go too fast).
Starting to learn to operate a 530 a few miles from the LHR zone inbound is, errrrr, not such a good plan.
To be honest, a Garmin 530 (and similar gadgets) is stone age, hardly usable at all. Navigation is one of the simplest tasks imaginable, to get from point A to point B in whatever line you want (straight line being the fastest). At least for VFR this is easily implemented in a intuitive point and click interface as is done in all current pad-software. Even highly integrated solutions should be easy and straight forward to use like the new G3X Touch.
If death reckoning would be the way to go, airliners would certainly use it, right?
On the other hand, some defenders of the compass&stopwatch technique argue with “this is the way they do it at the RAF, therefore it must be right”
But really, in military flight training, pure visual navigation over large distances at very low level and at very high speed is still trained a lot. They prepare each one-hour training misson very thoroughly sometimes for more than a day, watching videos and looking at photos of features along the route until everything is memorised. During the training missions, they will be graded based on the number of seconds they are early or late over their checkpoints. But then, they only fly 50-70 hours per year and can afford dedicating all that time for preparation.
