Bob Noel wrote:
In article .com,
wrote:

Yeah, I agree. Safety improvements are great.

The tone of your reply makes me wonder...

The tone is there because I'm still waiting to see why you think using
handhelds is unsafe. In many ways they add tremendously to safety,
especially the newer incarnations that depict terrain and weather. And
you probably agree that they are a great aid to situational awareness.
Why not, then, use them to help in certain navigation tasks as well?

Do you have data that shows that handheld GPS units are not more
reliable and dependable than the old VOR/DME/ADF system?


So how is safety
improved by telling people with perfectly good handheld GPSs

How do you KNOW that the handheld GPS is "perfectly good"?

Because the occasional failure is not a significant impact on safety.
Between the pilot and controller monitoring the flight, errors will be
caught. It doesn't have to be perfect to be "perfectly good", I guess
that was a poor choice of adjectives on my part.

How do you know any piece of avionics is working right? Some are more
reliable than others, but all can fail. Even panel mount GPS units
with RAIM. They can fail for various reasons that the RAIM algorithm
will not predict. It is supposed to prevent the pilot from using
erroneous data, and most of the time it probably does. But just
because they are "safer" than handhelds doesn't make handhelds unsafe,
doesn't it?

I'll agree that a GPS with RAIM is better than one without. Now, I
don't know the details, but I have read that WAAS has better fault
monitoring than standard GPS+RAIM. Does that mean that all those poor
sods out there flying IFR with their Garmin 430/530 units are being
unsafe?

And what about those handhelds that use WAAS? I don't know if they do,
but if they did have the full fault-monitoring capabilities, would
those be "safe" in your view?

that they
must stay on the airways and navigate with their VORs?

Who said they have to?

I was asking you a question. What is your view? If it is unsafe to
use your handheld to navigate direct, what are the choices that you
think are still "safe" for off-airway flights?

Peter