Do pilots still navigate?

MBDiagMan said:
Okay, the Mom comment was because someone said they flew at the age of 18 HOURS. They obviously meant 18 YEARS, but I was making a joke about flying when 18 HOURS old. Would anyone be able to do anything at the age of 18 HOURS unless they were with their Mother?

Good grief fellow! Read!
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Kritchlow said:
I don’t think it’s about paper vs electronics, but rather pilots getting lazy.
Back when airliners (or corporate) navigated across the country using VOR’s, the pilots had to be engaged in the process. They were always on top of their position simply because they were changing over VOR freqs and so forth.
Hopefully we are all still engaged, thus my earlier post about having airports/VOR’s displayed in the MFD.
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Back in the day I did a lot of trips from Dallas to and from DCA and LGA. We had VLF/Omega but always backed it up with VOR's. I still remember most of the VOR frequency's on that route and back in the day knew the center frequency's. To this day I will have a VOR with DME turned up.
 
Plano Pilot said:
Back in the day I did a lot of trips from Dallas to and from DCA and LGA. We had VLF/Omega but always backed it up with VOR's. I still remember most of the VOR frequency's on that route and back in the day knew the center frequency's. To this day I will have a VOR with DME turned up.
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Our FMS (like most) auto tune the closest VOR’s. I always keep a needle up for awareness, although mostly the display does not define the route.
 
The “we’re”in lieu of “were” is not where the confusion came from. The confusion came from 18 HOURS when I responded which was shortly thereafter corrected to 18 YEARS.
 
idahoflier said:
Not for me. I can't remember the last time I bought a chart. I just don't see any need, especially with resources like skyvector.com that's always up to date. I keep my EFB updated so I have all the charts and if GPS died, I could still navigate...
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Even on a big tablet or large computer screen, I can't get anything even close to size/resolution of spreading out a paper chart on the table at home for flight planning. In the cockpit, agreed, since you're going to have the chart folded anyway it's not much different.
 
David Megginson said:
Even on a big tablet or large computer screen, I can't get anything even close to size/resolution of spreading out a paper chart on the table at home for flight planning. In the cockpit, agreed, since you're going to have the chart folded anyway it's not much different.
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I don’t see the limitation you’re implying, I find electronic flight planning resources far superior to a WAC or SAC, but if a chart works for you, great!
 
David Megginson said:
Even on a big tablet or large computer screen, I can't get anything even close to size/resolution of spreading out a paper chart on the table at home for flight planning. In the cockpit, agreed, since you're going to have the chart folded anyway it's not much different.
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Trying to think of the last time I did that. Once you’re in bifocals spreading stuff across a table is fairly useless. Pinch zoom a fixed distance from your face works a whoooooole lot better.
 
Skyvector does not magnify beyond a certain point (at least on my computer). Garmin Pilot zooms as far as you can go.
 
denverpilot said:
Trying to think of the last time I did that. Once you’re in bifocals spreading stuff across a table is fairly useless. Pinch zoom a fixed distance from your face works a whoooooole lot better.
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The other thing I really like about planning on a tablet is that in FF I can switch to imagery and see what a particular landmark or airport actually looks like from the air. Pretty tough to do that with paper.
 
Hang 4 said:
Skyvector does not magnify beyond a certain point (at least on my computer). Garmin Pilot zooms as far as you can go.
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Well, I guess that's true. On my ipad skyvector zooms to the same scale as a sectional. On my pc I can zoom in a bit more, although I don't see what that utility provides? Here's a picture of a SAC (expired 22 OCT 2009) held up to my monitor...

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denverpilot said:
Trying to think of the last time I did that. Once you’re in bifocals spreading stuff across a table is fairly useless. Pinch zoom a fixed distance from your face works a whoooooole lot better.
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I'm in progressives, not bifocals, but isn't the whole point of either to let us see things close up or further away, just by changing our head angle slightly?
 
idahoflier said:
I don’t see the limitation you’re implying, I find electronic flight planning resources far superior to a WAC or SAC, but if a chart works for you, great!
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The limitation is not being able to see details along your whole route at once. On a tablet or computer screen, you can see your whole route at once with most detail removed or shrunk beyond legibility, or you can see a tiny sliding window of your route with details, but not both. Not that I spread out a paper chart every time I plan a flight (in fact, I'm voluntarily not flying at all right now during Ontario's stay-at-home order), but when I want to engage with where I'm flying, I find that the experience of having it all spread out over a bigger surface is quite different.

Or, in other words, just think of it this way -- you can flight plan perfectly well on your phone, but isn't it still nice having the bigger tablet screen? Well, a paper chart on a table is an even-bigger display. :) It's a lot easier to see the terrain and water bodies that will influence weather along your route, the alternative airports, the emergency-landing spots, the powerlines/roads/rivers that you could follow in a navigational emergency, etc. etc.
 
RingLaserGyroSandwich said:
Generally speaking everybody demonstrates the flight planning and cross country flying skills necessary for safe flight for their checkride. However, it's common for pilots to revert back to what the author was talking about afterwards unless they are working on their Commercial rating or something like that. I did my private pilot a few years ago in an airplane without GPS and I didn't carry an EFB so it was a great way to really focus on real cross country flying skills. When I worked on my instrument rating, most of those skills and that flight planning was set aside. When I started working on my commercial, I started to face the issue you are talking about.

Today, to help me get ready for the cross country portion of my commercial pilot final stage check, I did a little experiment. First I reviewed my flight plan with my instructor to verify that it meets the ACS and is also logical. I did the flight planning in my EFB instead of on paper (the way I did it for my private) since I think it's unlikely I'll actually do paper and E6B style flight planning regularly as a commercial pilot or private pilot just flying for fun. I did not program the route into the airplane's 430w, but it did give me a bit of situational awareness due to the moving map (I could have turned it off if I really felt like it, but nah, I like those traffic alerts etc. I kept track of my ETAs to each waypoint on my iPad using Forflight. Then, after a few waypoints, I turned off my Stratus 3 to simulate I lost GPS. There were a few lessons learned about what I would need to do in that instance, but generally speaking the flight planning I had done in the EFB allowed me to start recalculating my progress once I got to my next waypoint. I plan to play around with these scenarios a bit more on future flights until I understand exactly how I should do a safe cross country flight while still taking advantage of all the technology on my lap and installed into the cockpit.

This is not a trivial problem and if I earn my CFI rating I'm not sure how I will address it with my students. I need to think about it some more.
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Good advice. Many people allow their head to be behind the airplane. Learn to fly (again) with a constant DR position always going forward in your head, where you are in relation to the next waypoint, your position on a chart, estimating your drift by visual observation, know where you're going (terrain), progress to WP ETAs, etc. It helps in getting your mind ahead of the aircraft so when automation goes down, you don't also.
 
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