Similarly, on the odd occasion the GPS does throw a wobbly we use it in flight. More commonly we use a wheel to plan subsequent flights on return legs. Yes there is a GPS sat there, but to be quite honest it is often less hassel to use the wheel and not substantially slower.
Don't write off the wheel. It is an incredibly powerful tool and alot easier to use than is made out - practice makes perfect! There are even things it can do that our GPS cannot, like work out intercepts for moving way points (ok I agree that is not terribly useful).
Gadgets are great, but it doesn't mean the old stuff doesn't work. We still often fly IFR with no HSI, no Autopilot and no second GPS and we still get home on time
All the above proves is that a whole as yet undiscovered world can exist in some corner of aviation.
For a start, how often does a GPS "throw a wobbly"? What sort of a GPS are you using??? Was it made in the 1980s?
IFR with no HSI (presumably meaning no slaved DI) in a helicopter??? What kind of masochistic exercise is this?
The biggest problem is that anybody who can fly a helicopter while holding a heading to an accuracy where the slide rule would deliver a more accurate solution than the simplest rule of thumb (e.g. max drift is half the crosswind, etc) is a robot.
This is simply unreal. Could be an RAF or ex RAF crew perhaps, which was never exposed to the outside world?
Perhaps the most serious comment I can make is that some things can be practiced by very high hour highly trained pilots which would be completely stupid and inapplicable to all the rest.
Why not just fly partial panel, single pilot IFR, no autopilot, at night? Then you don't need much avionics, so even less to go wrong.