I have a bit of a different view on this…
I believe teaching PPL navigation is not much about “DR”, but about basic en-route flying.
The flight planning part is all about understanding wind corrections for heading and time in principle. It is a bit stupid that we HAVE to use a CRP5 and nothing mode modern, but other than that this is just the foundation.
For the flying part, I would say
all of which again are foundational skills.
And you can easily tell which pilots do lack some of these skills when they are flying using GPS navigation – they tend to be heads in and fly the symbol over the map, instead of looking out. As soon as you tell them to maintain a good lookout their heading/altitude tends to be all over the place. And I have seen a guy who flew over the top of a runway using GPS without ever seeing the airfield… this is not a problem with GPS/moving map navigation, but lack of / forgotten basics.
Once the foundations are there, it is OK to “graduate” to GPS navigation and moving maps, and actually it SHOULD be taught so people do not develop bad habits (such as the flying the symbol problem, which is the most common). At that stage it is completely fine that basic stopwatch-and-heading navigation is no longer used.
[And none of my students left the school without knowing about and using Skydemon…]
Yes, DR/paper map navigation works. GPS navigation and moving maps work better.
Basic Skills
It’s all very well to go on about what modern aids to teach student pilots but without the basic skills they just become computer minders without a clue as to what is going on unless it is on a screen in front of them, take a few bits of the information off the screen and they become a danger to themselves and to all around them. An example of this was the two supposedly highly trained Airbus pilots who because they had no idea of a basic pitch & power setting put a misbehaving but basically Serviceable aircraft into the South Atlantic and took two hundred or so trusting souls with them.
So if the pilots basic skills are intact and they have a good grounding in the basic skills of pitch & power ( airspeed) and the direction they are traveling ( a mental DR plot) the aircraft can be flown with reasonable accuracy over quite large distances following a total electrical failure.
While this is certainly not the way to go about day to day flying in busy airspace these basic skills are needed to keep the pilot and his passengers alive when the worst happens and are used to keep the aircraft in the air and pointed in the right direction for long enough for the pilot to plan a course of action to get the aircraft safely on the ground.
So until a tyro pilot has a reasonable skill level with the very basic skills of pitch & power and DR navigation they should not progress further in their flying training as all the advanced equipment will do is mask the pilots lack of skill.
A and C
Agree totally, if all the modern gadgets were the panacea, surely there would be fewer infringements. With the introduction of the LAPL, the standard will get lower however; I see little difference between a PPL skill test and a LAPL skill test! At the end of the day you can’t be less safe than safe.
I see little difference between a PPL skill test and a LAPL skill test!
DR / pilotage is still part of the syllabus, and quite right it is. VOR/ADF/DME isn’t, but then it’s not forbidden to learn.
My students always learn to use what is installed, including the GPS/VOR/NDB/GPS but no handhelds (since they aren’t allowed on the skill test). However, they start with basic map / compass/ stopwatch / window and occasionally, I’ll turn of some of the devices, basically because it is unwise to rely on just one navigation device.
DR/pilotage is completely doable even in more complex airspaces, e.g. around EDDF or between EDDK and EDDL. Just don’t fly that close to CAS boundaries and plan ahead. When travelling with two pilots (as I usually would), I get bored anyway so DR/pilotage is great to keep occupied. Other planes have an a/p and a CD-Player for that, but this just isn’t mine.
And as long as everyone get’s where he wants to be, everything seems fine. No need for fundamentally oppose DR/pilotage.
sooner or later some die-hard fundamentalist will bring up the “but this is how they do it in the RAF
Here’s an interesting watch on RAF Low Flying Navigation:
RAF Low Flying Navigation PART 1/2 rare archival footage:
RAF Low Flying Navigation PART 2/2 rare archival footage
In navigation, dead reckoning (also ded (for deduced) reckoning or DR) is the process of calculating one’s current position by using a previously determined position, or fix, and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course.
How many people have ever been taught to do that on a PPL course in recent years?
Navigation is the art of getting from A to B in an organised manner, usually the only element of DR used is the calculation of a Heading based upon an estimated wind. A pilot should be able to do that in his/her head and not using any gadgets.
Yes – the rules of thumb (e.g. max drift is half the crosswind) are good enough in the context of wx (winds aloft) forecast accuracy, so any higher accuracy as e.g. possible with the circular slide rule is illusory.
The RAF had some interesting tricks for its big jets, involving ground following radar which gave you the relative ground movement, which gave you the wind, and then you could do DR accurately. However its fast jets were woefully behind the times until not all that many years ago, from what I’ve been told speaking to one RAF instructor. But then so were the Russians…
I think the military will have good access to GPS in wartime, unless the adversary is big enough to take out the whole constellation. They would turn off/ jam the civilian signals and the military signals can be supplemented with INS technology which is now so cheap that for military uses the cost is so completely irrelevant that even a smart bomb has one on its nose (below $20k for a fully milspec guidance package, I hear).
The RAF had some interesting tricks for its big jets, involving ground following radar which gave you the relative ground movement
I presume you mean Doppler but long before that they had the drift sight, comprising a perspex scale a chinagraph and a eyepiece to look at the ground, you manually plotted the drift, do that on three headings and you have the wind, over land or sea.
max drift is half the crosswind
Only at 120 knots!
They would turn off/ jam the civilian signals
But that is needed to supplement the Military signal in order to measure the parameters that give the additional military accuracy!
A wonderfull instructional film that shows a crossroads that I passed just a few hours back and is still recognisable today.
This flim is so good that it is shown to all my students at the start of the navigation phase of their training.
I challenge you to get across any significant body of water by using DR only or as you put it “relying on DR” – see how well that works out
I am no Lindbergh, but he managed to fly New York to Paris over the Atlantic thru an entire day, night and day back into night, above an overcast at times and below one over the ocean, and hit his target at Dingle Bay within a few miles. I understand that he was forced to do this because his on board GPS failed shortly after takeoff. 
