There may be some clever people out there who never get temporarily unsure of their position, Mono, but I don't think I know any.
From my soap box, I am trying to get across a message of basic common navigational sense. Plan A and plan B.
An example, Having worked out a lovely plan from Belgium to Denmark with all the VOR's I wanted and all the frequencies I could find I then made plan B. East for 10 minutes, north until I get to the blue bit and turn right. Plan B worked so well I didn't bother with plan A. This was a two and a half hour flight during which I tried a variety of techniques including using a map and calculating ground speed from abeam VOR's.
But the aircraft had a panel mounted GPS.........which was u/s because the rain had seeped in and shorted the antenna.
To be brutally frank, if some-one can't work an ADF they will have no hope of working a GPS.
When all has turned squirly for you there will always be one instrument which, at the selection of three numbers, will point you an arrow straight to a position on the ground.
I have tried a variety of ADF's and GPS's. All the ADF's worked exactly the same way but I can't always get the GPS's to tell me what I want to know.
Rant Over.
It woiuld be interesting to know where the pilot in the above case started from. I'm just assuming that he knew where he was before he got lost. So if you start where you knew where you were and then work out which direction you went and for approximately how long, then you're not quite as lost as you were when you found you were lost. And if you know which way you need to go to get to where you want to be you'll have it cracked.