It's a pity if NDB approaches are going to disappear. They are a lot of fun and very satisfying when you get them right. They're a good test of instrument flying skills,
Apologies for the war story but I must say it is lovely to have all this modern stuff like LNAV and VNAV and GNNS’s and all singing and all dancing autopilots and copilots who read checklists, and speak up about Threat and Error management and are multi-fingered switch flickers who type at 80 words a minute but can’t fly but are real whips at “monitoring” every single action the pilot makes.
But we had more fun in my day when undergoing the annual instrument rating test in a venerable RAAF Dakota at the RAAF Central Flying School at East Sale. Much of the test was on limited panel since the suction gyro driven artificial horizons and directional gyros of that era would topple at over 55 degrees angle of bank
The NDB approach was conducted as a single pilot operation, with one propeller feathered, no autopilot, no artificial horizon (limited panel) and using the manual loop in aural null mode. For those unfamiliar what that meant it meant one hand in the cockpit roof twiddling a rotating knob while listening intently into your headset for an aural null when the loop aerial was 90 degrees to the radio beacon. It wasn’t an automatic direction finder for the exercise.
Of course we all knew it was a far-fetched useless exercise but if nothing else it was a wonderful instrument scanning exercise and many of us retained that basic scanning skill into airline flying.
As the man said in the highlight, NDB approaches were very satisfying when you got them right. I’ll go along with that.