Originally Posted by
Rat****
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
RS, I am not advocating a return to the 'good ole days', my 80 year old aunt sums it up best "the only thing good about 'the good ole days' is that they are gone!!"
However,
it's all about challenging yourself!
If you are going to do a fly away exercise as part of your commercial licence, why not get something out of it. I see far too many pilots who are so skilled at following a line on a screen, that when they come to my company, some with up to 3000 hours, they can't hold a constant heading. Now as we have no autopilot and rely on our hand flying skills, it annoys the passengers (and me) as they just meander back and forth chasing the CDI on the GPS. The easiest way for me to wind someone up during line training, is to turn of the GPS.
As a pilot I have a keen interest in navigation, I myself am learning celestial navigation, not because I long for days gone by, but because I am keen to learn as much as I can about my chosen profession. After all GPS uses the same theory as celestial navigation, except the heavenly bodies have been replaced by man made sattelites. Not to mention the same GPS also uses time/distance (ie: dead reckoning).
So what is the problem with fine tuning your navigation skills? After all that is one of the reasons for a fly away in the first place...
PS: I also fly with an up to date WAC chart!
PPS: Apologies to the topic starter for the thread drift...