That's excellent, and I have heard the same from a Swiss pilot in 2010, but it is suprising.
I was so afraid of having to fly an NDB procedure during my IFR check ride (the examiner was ca. 65 years old) that labelled the ADF as INOP. Given how inaccurate it was, my FI agreed 
I had to fly NDB holding using ADF on my IR check ride because it's a part of approaches for RW05 and missed approach for RW23 at LDZA.
I flew a procedural ILS based on holding at an NDB and a radar vectored NDB NPA on my UK IR flight test, which was no great surprise.
I have also had to fly an NDB to close to minima (cloudbase, not RVR thankfully) at short notice at Liverpool after the ILS went U/S not long after getting the ATIS on the way in. Flown with the GPS approach loaded for "monitoring" and keeping a close watch on the needle obviously.
The "gate" techniques are fairly easily taught, and actually not that hard to use. If you set the inbound course on the HSI CDI bar:
90° is fairly obvious - ADF should indicate 10° up
60°is with the CDI needle pointing at the top of the GS scale - ADF should show on track.
I don't find these use up any great extra complication or capacity - it's somewhat trickier with an RBI than an RMI, which is what I have, but not the great terror that it seems to be described as. NDB approaches are inaccurate and have high MDAs in general, but they are nothing to be afraid of.
I don't think anything currently taught is a "terror"; what concerns me is a misallocation of resources.
The current IR course is 50/55hrs and sure one can teach "everything" within that much time.
But if one reduces the "minimum enforced dual time" from the 50/55hrs, say down to 15hrs for the ICAO IR to JAA IR conversion, or down to 10hrs for the proposed CBM IR, then time spent on say NDB work is going to get brought into a sharper focus.
Currently, if you take "bona fide ab initio" instrument pilot students, almost nobody is going to reach the JAA IR test standard in much under 40-50hrs.
I think perhaps half the time spent is spent on NDB procedures.
In my FAA IR to JAA IR conversion, 90% of the time (I took about 25hrs, albeit with low currency of one flight per week, and a long break of a few weeks near the end) was spent on NDB procedures. And, frankly, at the end of that, I was no more than 25% sure of being able to fly a typical coastal NDB approach within the 5 degrees of the inbound track from the FAF all the way down to the MDH...
Unfortunately NDBs are all over Europe and are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future, so what am I really saying?
That a US-style GPS substitution should be formally allowed. It has been proven for well over a decade in the USA to be a highly safe procedure. And it looks like some non-UK JAA IR examiners have taken this on board.
Same issue with the JAA IR exams. I consider 90% of the contents to be garbage (others put the figure lower down). But intellectually it is banal. A motivated 10 year old who knows nothing of aviation could pass the stuff. But it's a poor allocation of resources to learn stuff like this
I think the reason a lot of time is spent on teaching NDB work is simply because the mental gymnastics of situational awareness using a single needle is the hardest part of the IR to get your head around if your brain doesn't work that way.
Anything that uses the CDI bar on the HSI or OBS is fairly easy to interpret and pick up as one simply centres the CDI bar and alters heading as required to keep it so.
Working out your position relative to an NDB, then what alterations are required to establish on and maintain a given track inbound and then outbound to a decent degree of accuracy (given that a significant minority of NDB approaches seem to involve passing over the beacon while on the approach) require a much higher level of spatial awareness, and if you are not fortunate enough either to have been blessed with it or have developed it through some other means before taking up instrument flying you will have to develop it on the course. The CAA requirement is in fact for a needle-interpreted approach and hold, which could just as easily be with a VOR on the RMI.
The CAA requirement is in fact for a needle-interpreted approach and hold, which could just as easily be with a VOR on the RMI.
I didn't know that. I thought that one could be given a VOR hold and a VOR approach, with no NDB work at all, and in a plane without an RMI.
I can't say that from experience, because while I was indeed given the VOR option, I do have an RMI. But most private planes don't have an RMI, which would mean the VOR option would never be available to them.
Sure, a needle-interpreted hold/approach is the most effective way of sorting men from sheep but what are we trying to achieve, when training civilian pilots?
If you were operating some sort of military system where you have 10x to 100x more applicants than positions (as I believe was the RAF situation in say the 1970s) then you might set a bar which delivers only as many as you can really use. But in a civilian system you just need to train for a given level of safety, and the more reach the standard the better for them, and the better for you (the school) because you make more money.
I agree that doing NDB approaches and holds does teach the relationship between heading, track and intended track - so a useful exercise and one that you should have to learn. But should I ever need to do an NDB approach say into EGTK for 01, I will always set it up on the GPS and use that. We all know it is more accurate.
In day-to-day flying the key is to get down in as safe a way as possible. That is GPS or ILS whether the CAA likes it or not.
Consequently, more time should be spent using modern avionics rather than, as Peter says, half the course being on something that is never used in practice by 99% of IR pilots.
A Flight Instructor I know said that these days if an airliner found that all of it's navigation equipment had inexplicably failed, and all they had to rely on for an approach was just a ADF of some form, then they would declare an emergency. I think I would agree with that.
If I was sitting comfortably (ok, lets just say sitting) on a low budget airline of my choice, and it was at night, in stormy weather and we were coming in to land at a coastal airport, and al they had was an ADF to rely on, I would very quickly consider a renewed interest in religion and begin to pray ;-)
So I agree with the most recent posts that spending in excess of 50% of the time mastering the ADF, when it will probaly by used +/- 1% of the time in reality, then its a bit of a waste of time and money. That said, if I was in a situation where my GNS430 and iPAD were not receiving a signal, and there was no serviceable ILS, then I suppose I would be grateful for all those hours spent on NDB approaches and holds. Its better than nothing (just about). Its a tricky one....
Wow, seems like the UK CAA is NDB-obsessed. I spent maybe 1 hour in the sim and 30 min in the airplane doing NDB stuff during my IR training and the instructor's focus was on showing me what a piece of garbage the ADF is, especially in turns. During the exam (where I had labeled the ADF INOP), the instructor said that he would never ask me to rely on it when every airplane has better things to offer. For the annual IR checkride, the examiner wants to see one precision and one non-precision approach. This means one ILS and one RNAV.
Having said that, I have hooked up my ADF to my glass cockpit. Why? Because the installer's quote said "connection to all navigation sources supported by the glass cockpit" and I found out that the Aspen can take an analog ADF. The installer was not happy but I made him stick to his word.
That said, if I was in a situation where my GNS430 and iPAD were not receiving a signal, and there was no serviceable ILS, then I suppose I would be grateful for all those hours spent on NDB approaches and holds. Its better than nothing (just about). Its a tricky one....
I'd agree, but if one looks at what system failures would be needed to bring about that situation...
A total loss of electrics is quite feasible - even in some twins. So you carry a handheld GPS (charged, or mounted somewhere where it is charging all the time). The probability of both these failing on the same flight is virtually nil.
The scenario where one would have to land with an ADF only is hard to imagine IF one carries a battery powered GPS.
And a loss of GPS function (for whatever reason) is unlikely to happen at the same time as a loss of the panel mounted instruments in the plane, one of which will be a GPS anyway.
The other gripe with the ADF is that, historically, it has a crap reliability even by the dubious standard of some brands of avionics. The antenna unit is vulnerable to water ingress. Due to the bottom having fallen out of the US ADF market (i.e. the entire commercially relevant universe) some 15 years ago, no R&D has gone into the technology, so most people are flying with crap ADFs which work on a good day or which work till the last one you bought on Ebay has gone on the blink also. I think the only ADF which is reasonably reliable is the KR87 whose antenna is epoxy filled, but even then the internals of the control unit are something out of a 1968 Tektronix scope (except that the Tek scope wasn't subjected to misture and vibration). I have a spare KR87 system on the shelf, with an 8130-3 form so it must be perfect 
