Flight Lessons

"Ed Rasimus" wrote

A lot of guys had the same wistful thought about INS. Simply enter the
coordinates and follow the bearing pointer to the target.

Korean Air 007 comes to mind (if that story is true...)

I recall an ORI out of Torrejon Spain that sent us to a tanker in the
N. Atlantic on a track we seldom used. The "planning cell" in the
command post prepared our flight data cards and transposed two digits
in a Lat/Long for INS coordinates. I was leading with the wing DO on
my wing. When we coasted out from Spain, the bearing point showed 40
degrees left of where the TACAN radial was and where ded reckoning
said we should head. I went to the tanker track while the DO told me I
was wrong and should follow the INS. I told him he was #2 and to
maintain radio silence. We went to the tanker.

Back then everyone was super-chatty on the radios, while today you
very rarely use the radio, so I would assume you could just go ADF or
Air-Air TACAN and watch the range decrease :-)

I agree, you have to have a cross-check, and a simple approximate
before calculation is bound to keep you out of trouble longer.

On 06 Aug 2003 21:35:40 GMT, (OXMORON1) wrote:

Murphy attacks, things break, power supplies don't..
Try 14+ hours McChord to HI, daylight, nothing worked, even the sextant had a
split bubble, it is too late to get out the book and read. You better have
learned it in training, whatever crew position you hold.

Oxmoron1
MFE
And it was a FREAKING check ride!

Lol....

Give me a chart/map, water compass and a watch and I'll manage.

I never ceased to be amazed at the panic that sets in when a guy loses
his navaids.

Maybe good old-fashioned dead reckoning is becoming a lost art.....

My regards,

Widewing (C.C. Jordan)
http://www.worldwar2aviation.com
http://www.netaces.org
http://www.hitechcreations.com

"Paul J. Adam" wrote:

snip

Ed's point is spot on - you need an idea of roughly what the answer
_should_ be, before you slip the sticks or spin the dials. Electronic
calculators are worse because people tend to believe the answer,
regardless of precision or magnitude. Am I the only person who's seen a
fellow student report a result that not only had the decimal point in
the wrong place, but was to eight significant figures "plus or minus
40%"?

I can't recall anything that bad (but maybe I've forgotten some of the more
interesting results from chem class), but I do remember way back when learning
resistor color codes, seeing people in the class answer a set of test questions on
basic resistor color coding and tolerance, i.e. what is the nominal value and
tolerance of this resistor, and what are the minimum and maximum values acceptable
given the tolerance. Most people used a calculator (I didn't as it was faster to do
it in my head; how hard is it to calculate 1, 5 or 10% tolerance?). One guy was
representative, coming up with answers like the following for a 300 ohm, 10%
resistor: low and high values of 2.7 ohms and 330,000 ohms. Purely because he (and
they) didn't think, but just wrote down whatever answer the calculator gave them.

To be sure, a lot of them had poor basic math skills to start with, which I, being a
cranky, relatively young fart at the time, put down to them never having to learn
to do basic math in their head or by hand in elementary school, so they had no idea
whether the answer made any sense. But what can you expect in a state where the
public teacher's unions complain that because too many of their members can't pass
the math, english and other competency tests, they should be made easier, despite
the tests having already been dumbed down first to 11th and subsequently 8th grade
level? One suspects that they too 'learned' to do math with a calculator, assuming
that they ever learned at all.

Here ends my 'everything's gone to hell in handbasket since my day' rant. Honesty
compels me to admit that I only had to walk between 1 and 2 miles each way to
school, that it was only uphill ONE way, that it never snowed (this is the San
Francisco Bay Area), and that gas-fired central heating, electric lighting and hot
and cold running water was provided.

Guy

Subject: Flight Lessons
From: (OXMORON1)
Date: 8/6/03 2:35 PM Pacific Daylight Time

Murphy attacks, things break, power supplies don't..
Try 14+ hours McChord to HI, daylight, nothing worked, even the sextant had a
split bubble, it is too late to get out the book and read. You better have
learned it in training, whatever crew position you hold.

That is always the case.

Arthur Kramer
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

Corey C. Jordan wrote:

Maybe good old-fashioned dead reckoning is becoming a lost art.....

Nah, there's a few of us who still teach it and use it every day. In
fact, at the World Air Games, only pilotage and dead reckoning
is permitted. No RNAV (e.g: GPS) allowed.

-Mike Marron

wrote in message ...

************************************************** **************************

GPS navigation is wonderful, but we are just now beginning to realize
the many downsides of GPS such as tunnel vision, degraded situational
awareness, increased airspace incursions, more heads-down flying,
more buttons and more confusion.

************************************************** ***************************



Hmmm. In the civilian recreational pilot world GPS is pretty much seen as the best thing
to hit navigation since the invention of bread. I would believe there are fewer airspace incursions
since there is more awareness of exactly where you are and why the airspace
boundries are.

"Enhanced situational awareness" is a selling point of pretty much every
avation GPS sold.

Are you a pilot? Do your pilot friends also think these things about GPS?

wrote in message ...
The USAF began using GPS as far
back as Dec. 1973, but the civilian pilot community is still wrestling
with GPS issues such as accuracy, availability, redundancy, and
integrity to this day. AOPA conducted a study that indicated flying on
GPS w/o autopilot actually resulted in two to four times *greater*
cockpit workload. ... pilots flying via GPS with
out-of-date databases (they're supposed to be updated every
28 days for IFR use), and the list goes on and on...


I dunno. I fly without an autopilot, sometimes with a GPS and
sometimes without. I simply don't believe that the GPS doubles
my total workload. I'm SURE it doesn't double my workload

Could you please provide a reference to this AOPA study? I have
a hard time believing it exists .... this sounds much more like urban
legend than actual fact. I'll be happy to rectact the last sentence if
I'm wrong.

Subject: Flight Lessons
From: "Charles Talleyrand"
Date: 8/6/03 9:10 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:


wrote in message
.. .
The USAF began using GPS as far
back as Dec. 1973, but the civilian pilot community is still wrestling
with GPS issues such as accuracy, availability, redundancy, and
integrity to this day. AOPA conducted a study that indicated flying on
GPS w/o autopilot actually resulted in two to four times *greater*
cockpit workload. ... pilots flying via GPS with
out-of-date databases (they're supposed to be updated every
28 days for IFR use), and the list goes on and on...


I dunno. I fly without an autopilot, sometimes with a GPS and
sometimes without. I simply don't believe that the GPS doubles
my total workload. I'm SURE it doesn't double my workload

Could you please provide a reference to this AOPA study? I have
a hard time believing it exists .... this sounds much more like urban
legend than actual fact. I'll be happy to rectact the last sentence if
I'm wrong.


I agree with you. It is amazing that every post in this NG on GPS has been
negative; talking about difficulty of use, failures, inacuracies and time
consuming operations.and also making it seem as though every one who used GPS
was untrained and just generally incompetant. I guess if we had GPS in WW II
we would have lost the war. The mind boggles. (sheesh)

Arthur Kramer
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

(ArtKramr) wrote:
"Charles Talleyrand" wrote:
wrote:

The USAF began using GPS as far
back as Dec. 1973, but the civilian pilot community is still wrestling
with GPS issues such as accuracy, availability, redundancy, and
integrity to this day. AOPA conducted a study that indicated flying on
GPS w/o autopilot actually resulted in two to four times *greater*
cockpit workload. ... pilots flying via GPS with
out-of-date databases (they're supposed to be updated every
28 days for IFR use), and the list goes on and on...

I dunno. I fly without an autopilot, sometimes with a GPS and
sometimes without. I simply don't believe that the GPS doubles
my total workload. I'm SURE it doesn't double my workload

Could you please provide a reference to this AOPA study? I have
a hard time believing it exists .... this sounds much more like urban
legend than actual fact. I'll be happy to rectact the last sentence if
I'm wrong.

I agree with you. It is amazing that every post in this NG on GPS has been
negative; talking about difficulty of use, failures, inacuracies and time
consuming operations.and also making it seem as though every one who used GPS
was untrained and just generally incompetant. I guess if we had GPS in WW II
we would have lost the war. The mind boggles. (sheesh)

You guys are still missing the point (as I said, I've been using GPS
to navigate in both VFR and IFR for years and I think it's great). To
answer Charles question, you can contact AOPA and ask for Katherine
Fish. She should be able to refer you to the study, or at least give
you a bit of an education on the downsides of GPS.

-Mike Marron
CFII, A&P, etc.

"Charles Talleyrand" wrote:
wrote:

GPS navigation is wonderful, but we are just now beginning to realize
the many downsides of GPS such as tunnel vision, degraded situational
awareness, increased airspace incursions, more heads-down flying,
more buttons and more confusion.

Hmmm. In the civilian recreational pilot world GPS is pretty much seen
as the best thing to hit navigation since the invention of bread.

Exactly right. And therein lies the crux of the problem (e.g: GPS is
pretty much seen as the ONLY thing to hit navigation since the
invention of bread).

I would believe there are fewer airspace incursions since there is
more awareness of exactly where you are and why the airspace
boundries are.

You're obviously not a flight instructor, huh?

"Enhanced situational awareness" is a selling point of pretty much every
avation GPS sold.

Yep, definitely not a flight instructor.

Look at it this way, Charles. If you ever do become an instructor do
us all a big favor and *don't* teach your ab initio students how to
use a GPS until they learn pilotage and dead reckoning first.

Are you a pilot?

Ya. Are you a pirate?

Do your pilot friends also think these things about GPS?

Yo ho yo ho shiver me timbers!

-Mike (newbies, ya' just gotta' love 'em) Marron