Am I a Luddite or a realist ?
Those of you who think that the magenta line is a basic skill are living in some sort of techno dream world, without the basic skill of DR navigation you should not be let anywhere near an aircraft, as to this situational awareness rubbish, likewise if you can't paint the picture in your head then you should not be flying.
These DR & SA skills are the very fundamentals of piloting and without developing them you are putting your neck in a noose, that noose will tighten very quickly when the screens go blank and you are back to three little round dials to keep the aircraft upright and pointed away from the hills.
Odia If you do your CPL the navigation part is largely DR, the choice is to get with the program now or it will cost you to relearn the skills.
About now I can feel the techno wannabes dismissing me as an old fart who wants the return of the Astro compass & air almanac but I think you need to know why you need the old skills even for aircraft far more sophisticated than the Cirrus & DA40.
A few years back I was relaxing over a cup of tea at FL350 in an A320 an aircraft with a multiple sensor navigation system that makes the Cirrus look like something from the dark ages. The recent graduate from the Magenta kindergarten who was sitting in the right seat decides to try some FMC magic without consulting me, the result of the lighting speed fingers is that he dumps the aircraft position and all the navigation screens go blank!
He then goes into total panic mode, clueless as to what is his next move.
I go down to the flight plan set the HDG in the compass ( yes the one like you have in the Cessna 152) and start the clock ready for the next waypoint, once the aircraft was safely pionted in the right direction I probe for a VOR radial and distance to get an accurate position to get the FMC back on line.
The point I make is that by NOT training and practicing for DR navigation you are trusting your life to bit of kit that will happily fly you into mountain if it fails or you put rubbish into it, the Cirrus & DA40 systems are not reliable enough to trust in the way that the duplicated systems in airliners can be trusted but even those airliner systems are subject to errors both human and technical that is why even today in airliners we also use a paper navigation log that will enable us to get a DR plot running if the screens go black.
Oh I amend this post as I hear that in The Times today they say that humans are getting more stupid because they are letting technology do all the thinking for them, one can only speculate from the some of the posts above if this is true.
Last edited by A and C; 13th Nov 2012 at 07:58.