But the £100 camping GPS can also be used PROVIDING the user takes the time to put in a proper route which considers all the NOTAMs and current charts
Any nav method is legal, but a moving-map GPS gives you situational awareness and position relative to airspace.
A non-moving map GPS doesn't even begin to compare. You might as well use a moving map unit and stick duct tape over the whole display, with a little window cut out showing the lat/long, the track and a few other numbers. OK, people can enter waypoints manually into the camping shop units, but this creates another area ripe for unavoidable human errors. No wonder people slag off GPS so much. As always in UK GA,
cost must be the underlying issue here.
In my business I have to develop procedures which ensure that everything that goes out of the door is 100% right. One soon realises that if you pay somebody £200k they will make the same number of human errors they would make if you paid them £10k. It is the
system one is operating that (largely) determines how many c0ckups an individual with a particular attitude to getting things right is going to make. That's why the CAA safety evenings are a waste of time IMHO - no use telling people to not fly into hills, etc.
If you fly with 1:50k O/S charts then you must be doing a very different sort of flying to most. I have those on a tablet PC too - great fun to watch but of no use I can see for aviation (except for buzzing some bird's house
)
What struck me about the ontrack report is that it didn't find out what exactly led up to the error. Obviously nobody is going to plan to infringe airspace, or infringe an airshow, so something must have led to that situation. It's no use accusing the pilot of having been in a hurry to get home, or having been swayed by others to fly, for example; that tells us exactly nothing.
I have already said that notam related stuff is caused mainly by pilots not being taught to get notams in the first place, so I will leave that one now.
I suspect that airspace infringements are caused either by plain nav errors, or by a departure from the planned route (call it "bimbling" if you like). The question then becomes: how to minimise those, in the context of a "45-hour" PPL followed by perhaps just a few hours a year flown.