I infringed today . . .
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Originally Posted by NuName
The poster is a 35 hour student. Do you really believe a GPS would enhance his performance for the future.
An example: "there's the town I need down there....or is it, that town over there looks like it as well....blimey I'm not too sure now.....oh lets just have a double check on the GPS.....ahhh it is the wrong town, the wind must be stronger than was reported. Right now I must now plan my adjustments...."
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The UK PPL I believe requires navigation by dead reckoning, you need that skill first, even if it is a little traumatic. It pays dividends in the long run.
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Originally Posted by NuName
The UK PPL I believe requires navigation by dead reckoning, you need that skill first, even if it is a little traumatic. It pays dividends in the long run.
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Learn by using map & stopwatch only, once competent then start using navaids such as GPS, VORS etc. but keep up the basic skills.
Bit like the way calculators have taken over from mental arithmetic - not a problem until the calculator doesn't work for any reason.
Bit like the way calculators have taken over from mental arithmetic - not a problem until the calculator doesn't work for any reason.
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I can't work the f*@king GPS in the a/c I usually fly,although its having a 430put in at the mo which should be better.
So for me post ppl and pre cpl, a map,whiz wheel and a pen does the job.
Its easy anyway if you do it right.
So for me post ppl and pre cpl, a map,whiz wheel and a pen does the job.
Its easy anyway if you do it right.
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i was out of WW for a nav exercise, (rhs) and got lost over approx compton abbas.
it would have been really nice to have a gps map display just to check where we where.
i thought i was a half decent map reader, (ex rally navigator), but it was disconcerting for me as a student to realise that from the air, towns and roads etc.. look very much alike.
situational awareness is essential, imho.
it would have been really nice to have a gps map display just to check where we where.
i thought i was a half decent map reader, (ex rally navigator), but it was disconcerting for me as a student to realise that from the air, towns and roads etc.. look very much alike.
situational awareness is essential, imho.
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Originally Posted by NuName
You would if you were training in the UK, you really would not have much choice.
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Originally Posted by SkyHawk-N
but that shouldn't stop us thinking that things could be improved
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Of course you need to learn DR, but GPS is a fact of life and it makes aviation safer. It is a near unbelievable, superb aid to basic navigation. It is far more accurate and easier than radio navigation, not to mention a damn sight simpler and less time consuming. You can still infringe, but it sure as hell helps in those dodgy situations where you're not quite sure which town is which and you're wandering around close to CAS.
The CAA chooses to ignore it completely. How does that improve flight safety? How does it improve flight safety to send PPL students off without the best, simplest aid to navigation ever invented?
QDM
The CAA chooses to ignore it completely. How does that improve flight safety? How does it improve flight safety to send PPL students off without the best, simplest aid to navigation ever invented?
QDM
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Whopity,
The fact that people with opinions like yours still exist, depresses me deeply. The Dakota was a great aircraft, the pinnacle of aviation in its day, but its no Boeing 757.
YE Gods it’s a wonder we’ve progressed at all. I have no desire to live in a world where doctors still bleed you, sail dominates the high seas, and only land owners get to vote.
Heading and Time you, say, well without constant reference to the ground, or when flying at night, only 1 in 100 aircraft from the much vaunted RAF could find Berlin, one Europe’s largest cities, never mind a little air field in the country. Those men were well trained, and had dedicated navigators, not one poor sod doing both jobs. Ded reckoning is totally dependant on winds aloft, and when was last time that forecast was correct!
If you’ve never used a moving map colour screen GPS with a up to date aviation data base displaying course, track, X track, altitude, destination and ETA readouts right there constantly in front of you, then I suggest you do. You will find you spend much more time with your head out of the cockpit than in it, looking and maps and fiddling with your watch.
For cross country work students don’t need to learn ‘ded reckoning’ any more than they need to learn how a rotary engine works.
They need to learn 2 things:
1.Pilotage; they need to learn to read a map, to draw line on it, and follow it.
2.Fuel management.
1 and 2 are for backup to GPS as primary navigation.
GPS has made flying safer and simpler, and I’m all for that.
Regards,
White Bear.
Does the Royal Navy still insist every able seaman can row?
The fact that people with opinions like yours still exist, depresses me deeply. The Dakota was a great aircraft, the pinnacle of aviation in its day, but its no Boeing 757.
YE Gods it’s a wonder we’ve progressed at all. I have no desire to live in a world where doctors still bleed you, sail dominates the high seas, and only land owners get to vote.
Heading and Time you, say, well without constant reference to the ground, or when flying at night, only 1 in 100 aircraft from the much vaunted RAF could find Berlin, one Europe’s largest cities, never mind a little air field in the country. Those men were well trained, and had dedicated navigators, not one poor sod doing both jobs. Ded reckoning is totally dependant on winds aloft, and when was last time that forecast was correct!
If you’ve never used a moving map colour screen GPS with a up to date aviation data base displaying course, track, X track, altitude, destination and ETA readouts right there constantly in front of you, then I suggest you do. You will find you spend much more time with your head out of the cockpit than in it, looking and maps and fiddling with your watch.
For cross country work students don’t need to learn ‘ded reckoning’ any more than they need to learn how a rotary engine works.
They need to learn 2 things:
1.Pilotage; they need to learn to read a map, to draw line on it, and follow it.
2.Fuel management.
1 and 2 are for backup to GPS as primary navigation.
GPS has made flying safer and simpler, and I’m all for that.
Regards,
White Bear.
Does the Royal Navy still insist every able seaman can row?
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Yes do learn how useful a GPS is. It is a real safety aid.
BUT PLEASE ALSO LEARN HOW TO USE THE GOOD OLD
MAP, COMPAS, WATCH AND THE MK.1. EYEBALL TO LOOK OUTSIDE.
YES, DO LOOK OUTSIDE AT LEAST 95% OF YOUR TIME.
The GPS will tell you where you are, and when you will arrive (hopefully), BUT is removes a big chunk of your situational awareness.
Example:-
Take any weekend or even professional pilot.
Let them fly about a bit using the GPS.
Then take it away, without warning and replace it with a standard map.
Sit back and watch the fun.
Over familar terrain its easy. Not so much fun.
BUT put them some where they've never been befor and then it really is fun.
The result is that most will become lost.
Yes LOST.
The professionals too.
You only need to be lost for a minute or too and ..... well ......
Fly with a pilot using a GPS in a light aircraft and I'll bet they spend more time looking at the GPS than the view outside. They are just accidents or incidents looking for somewhere to happen or for that matter, get lost.
Fly safe, don't be distracted by the instruments or GPS and enjoy the view outside.
BUT PLEASE ALSO LEARN HOW TO USE THE GOOD OLD
MAP, COMPAS, WATCH AND THE MK.1. EYEBALL TO LOOK OUTSIDE.
YES, DO LOOK OUTSIDE AT LEAST 95% OF YOUR TIME.
The GPS will tell you where you are, and when you will arrive (hopefully), BUT is removes a big chunk of your situational awareness.
Example:-
Take any weekend or even professional pilot.
Let them fly about a bit using the GPS.
Then take it away, without warning and replace it with a standard map.
Sit back and watch the fun.
Over familar terrain its easy. Not so much fun.
BUT put them some where they've never been befor and then it really is fun.
The result is that most will become lost.
Yes LOST.
The professionals too.
You only need to be lost for a minute or too and ..... well ......
Fly with a pilot using a GPS in a light aircraft and I'll bet they spend more time looking at the GPS than the view outside. They are just accidents or incidents looking for somewhere to happen or for that matter, get lost.
Fly safe, don't be distracted by the instruments or GPS and enjoy the view outside.
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Yes do learn how useful a GPS is. It is a real safety aid.
Fly with a pilot using a GPS in a light aircraft and I'll bet they spend more time looking at the GPS than the view outside.
We’re all entitled to our opinions, but I fail to see how working maps, watches, writing things down, estimating cross track, working the protractor and wiz wheel, guestimating how much, and in which direction to turn to get back on course, and all the other things that ‘ded reckoning’ requires can provide superior situational awareness.
I do recommend having a map to hand, and checking off your weigh points on the line you have drawn, but that only takes 10 seconds every 10 minutes. Hard to get lost then don’t you think?
W.B.
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The GPS will tell you where you are, and when you will arrive (hopefully), BUT is removes a big chunk of your situational awareness.
I fail to understand why GPS appears to excite such anti feelings. It's an extraordinary aid to navigation. People who decry it in the ways expressed here are like people who don't like these new-fangled aileron things and think we should stick with wing-warping.
Get real: a moving map, GPS, in a split second glance, will tell you exactly where you are on the planet and which direction you're moving and how fast. What, for God's sake, is wrong with that? Why is it viewed as 'cheating'?
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Originally Posted by White Bear
We’re all entitled to our opinions, but I fail to see how working maps, watches, writing things down, estimating cross track, working the protractor and wiz wheel, guestimating how much, and in which direction to turn to get back on course, and all the other things that ‘ded reckoning’ requires can provide superior situational awareness.
So much easier just to use a GPS.
Such fun playing with the worlds most impenetrable user interface, such that it takes minutes to try to get it to do anything at all ... oh, no problem, programme the route on the ground before starting the engine, that way it doesn't cost you an extra £20 just to get your route in.
OK ... then there's a little bit of slightly iffy weather ... you've got a choice of going straight ahead - after all, you're fairly sure you can nearly see through that cloud - or trying to work out a diversion and programme that in, lemme see, pull the knob out and rotate four clicks anti-clockwise, press the cursor button three times, push the knob in and rotate seventeen clicks clockwise ... yes, I'm really sure I can nearly see through that cloud, OK straight ahead then, besides after all that heads-in time I'm already in the cloud.
Right, now, not sure entirely where I am - but never mind, the GPS has got lots of numbers displayed on it, that tells me exactly! Now, just let's try and relate all those numbers to my real map, whilst trying to maintain straight and level and keep a lookout ... er ... hmm ... er, can't quite get the picture ... ah! - the GPS has a moving map mode! - and I was clever enough to memorise the bizarre set of button pushes necessary to switch modes, so here we are! Er, yes. Now, what scale is that? - it shows one town and one road, not desperately helpful, am I half a mile away or ten miles away. I'm sure there was some controlled airspace around here somewhere??? - perhaps the previous hirer turned off that layer (not something I've ever learned how to turn back on)?? - perhaps I should have taken some notice of that warning about the database being out of date when I switched the thing on?? - yes, there was something in the school's flying order book about not relying on the airspace database.
And so on and so on ... hand helds, so you can familiarlise yourself with one device? Sure, and how many batteries do you carry with you, and the ones you drop go through which holes in the floor and jam which control cables ...
OK, so none of this is a problem if you're rich enough to have your own plane and your own GPS so that it's worth spending time learning how to use it properly and you're rich enough to fly often enough that you don't forget stuff, like in which order the 17 different display pages come and how do you turn the military airspace layer back on, and you're rich enough to afford the database updates and so on, but for the rest of us?
[devils-advocate-smilely]
(Yes I do usually programme my route into the GPS, and I sometimes even look at it. And one of the club aircraft has a large colour moving map, which entertains small boy passengers no end, but I only turn it on towards the end of the flight otherwise they'd never look out of the window.)
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An interesting topic and Stik was brave to start it.
Pilot navigation has never been particularly easy and in my experience has become less so since they stopped painting the names on the roofs of railway stations. Hell, it's difficult enough just to find a railway these days.
I'm too old to have any operational knowledge of this GPS gizmo but using it sounds very much easier then trying to get some sense out of a couple of ADFs, getting X marks the spot on the chart draped over your twitching knee, marking off drift and performing other calculations with your Airtour computer whilst passing through a frontal system in something as unstable on instruments as a PA30. That type of workload a pilot can do without. We thought Nirvana had arrived with the introduction of VOR and DME.
But these things quite intentionally were called "Navaids" as they are precisely that. In no way are they substitutes for proper navigation or situational awareness. However, as QDM3 astutely observes, there is little point in fighting with one hand behind your back and if GPS assists in a reduction of workload, leaving the pilot to do a generally better (for better, read "safer") job, why pooh-pooh it?
Having just brought myself up to date on the "Epaulette" thread, I have this mental picture of the "four bar wonder" climbing into a Cherokee 140 with his bag stuffed full of oudated Jeps, bubble sextant and sight reduction tables. Much more macho than a little handheld GPS which he can't use anyway. There are some tiresomely silly people out there.
Pilot navigation has never been particularly easy and in my experience has become less so since they stopped painting the names on the roofs of railway stations. Hell, it's difficult enough just to find a railway these days.
I'm too old to have any operational knowledge of this GPS gizmo but using it sounds very much easier then trying to get some sense out of a couple of ADFs, getting X marks the spot on the chart draped over your twitching knee, marking off drift and performing other calculations with your Airtour computer whilst passing through a frontal system in something as unstable on instruments as a PA30. That type of workload a pilot can do without. We thought Nirvana had arrived with the introduction of VOR and DME.
But these things quite intentionally were called "Navaids" as they are precisely that. In no way are they substitutes for proper navigation or situational awareness. However, as QDM3 astutely observes, there is little point in fighting with one hand behind your back and if GPS assists in a reduction of workload, leaving the pilot to do a generally better (for better, read "safer") job, why pooh-pooh it?
Having just brought myself up to date on the "Epaulette" thread, I have this mental picture of the "four bar wonder" climbing into a Cherokee 140 with his bag stuffed full of oudated Jeps, bubble sextant and sight reduction tables. Much more macho than a little handheld GPS which he can't use anyway. There are some tiresomely silly people out there.
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Stik
Just come across this thread.... I am a D&D controller & recently qualified PPL. Just to reiterate what the others have said from the horses mouth as it were.
If you ever begin to get an uneasy feeling about your nav call us sooner rather than later, that is part of the reason we are here. However as someone said earlier, if you are lost, say you are lost. If you just call for a training fix we will tell you where you are (although perhaps we wont if we have a real emegency on) and then move you on sharpish. However if you say you are lost we will stay with you until we have got you back into a position where you are 100% happy with where you are.
Have you called 121.5 for a training fix or a practice pan during your training? If not i would suggest you speak to your FI and give us a call so that you become comfortable with the use of 121.5....... we are here to help.
Regards
Diddley Dee.
Just come across this thread.... I am a D&D controller & recently qualified PPL. Just to reiterate what the others have said from the horses mouth as it were.
If you ever begin to get an uneasy feeling about your nav call us sooner rather than later, that is part of the reason we are here. However as someone said earlier, if you are lost, say you are lost. If you just call for a training fix we will tell you where you are (although perhaps we wont if we have a real emegency on) and then move you on sharpish. However if you say you are lost we will stay with you until we have got you back into a position where you are 100% happy with where you are.
Have you called 121.5 for a training fix or a practice pan during your training? If not i would suggest you speak to your FI and give us a call so that you become comfortable with the use of 121.5....... we are here to help.
Regards
Diddley Dee.