We have seen lots of people with road based GPS being "over reliant "or following it blindly resulting in cars in rivers, trucks where no truck should be and the like.
That's true but driving is not a comparable situation to flying, for a whole pile of fairly obvious reasons. On the road, take your eyes off the road for a few seconds and you may be dead. The whole scenario is different. And yes a % of drivers are truly completely stupid and some evidently will drive a car into a river. But given the crap databases of many driving units, one can easily get led down the wrong street and then you get some d1ck who is tailgating you who knows the area well getting all hot under the collar
Satnav is actually really crap; the other week I was in a hire car in Germany, in close to zero vis due to heavy rain, and the satnav just kept taking us back to the same road which was closed due to roadworks. Obviously the locals behind us were going nuts... I am sure every driver can relate to that. Serious commercial travellers have high-end solutions for that kind of thing and they aren't cheap. I was lucky; I had a passenger who was able to work out how to work the satnav.
There are certain specific things which are less than smart to be doing with an aviation GPS e.g. entering waypoint coordinates using lat/long numbers, or using user waypoints in a unit which is in a shared aircraft
But any GPS with a moving map that depicts the general area makes it awfully hard to get lost.
OTOH the other day I did a search on Ebay for
used Pooleys Guides (just as a joke, for a presentation I was doing, where I wanted to make a point about flying with current data) and I counted 17 of them, mostly several years old (which translates to several hundred UK PPLs flying with massively out of date Pooleys i.e. a few % of the pilot population) so I suppose there are people out there stupid enough to fly with a £50 GPS from Millets which gives you zero situational awareness.
In that case the issue isn't the GPS (which is prob99.99999 doing its job) but you just have a pretty good proof that common sense is not a requirement for getting a PPL.
I always tell people to buy a nice big GPS, not the little ones. With a decent big GPS it is virtually impossible to get lost.
But the whole training environment is pretty poor and carries on being pretty poor, and not everybody has the benefit of knowing somebody who can provide a bit of mentoring. When I did my IMCR (2002) we used 2 planes, both PA28s, one with a working ADF but a duff DME and the other with a good DME and a duff ADF. The instructor (a CPL/IR who later got a job flying commuter turboprops) was ever so proud of his £50 GPS which he got in the USA for £20 less than they were in the UK (and he told everybody about that) set the airport as a DCT and used the GPS as a "DME" and read out the numbers to me when I was learning NDB approaches. What is the moral of the story? In 2012, such a student should perhaps ask his school for a 50% refund
Loads of easy ammo for those looking for an example.
What they forget is that if you get the proverbial interview at Gatwick without tea and biscuits, they won't give you
any credit for pulling out a CRAP-1 and a beautiful handwritten plog.