being a massivley experienced pilot of 75.3 hrs
, I have to say I was absolutly amazed during my training about how accurate stopwatch and visual navigation was
9/10 I was hitting my marks within 15-30 secs of my planned time, and if I was more than 1 min out I would start to worry.. Not bad for an old C-150 using data from the handbooks that were made before I was born
I know it sounds very old fashioned, but as my instructor at the time taught me, if you have a decent flight plan and a few diversion airfields lined up and planned before you fly, it is SOOOOO easy follow, and removes a lot of stress... How many accident/incident reports do you see that have the same factors in?
, "Ran out of fuel", "poor or no Preflight Planning!" etc etc? All simple stuff that gets ignored at peoples peril
Don't get me wrong, I am 26 so in no way a technophobe, and I can clearly see the undoubtedly HUGE advantages of GPS, moving maps etc, but IMHO surley is is better to treat it as another "Layer" to your nav armour, using it to cross check your visual/ stopwatch/VOR/DME Nav? that way if you have made a mess of one part of it, you should catch yourself with the other?
