Originally Posted by
Howard Hughes
turn off the GPS and treat this as an exercise in dead reckoning
Yes! Make sure that you do the trip in an aircraft of Tiger Moth vintage, and tear a page out of an old atlas for your map. Anything else won't make you a "real" pilot.
Come on guys, this is 2006!!!
The greatest advance in general aviation in the last 30 years (I speak with some authority cause I have been flying that long)
is GPS -
use it.
Sure - keep a dead-reckoning/map reading back up, but why would you fly in the most isolated part of Australia without using the latest technology at your disposal?
I did Longreach-Birdsville-Alice Springs-Ayers Rock a couple of weeks ago - great trip.
What is the point of clever people inventing this stuff if we don't use it???
R