Do you have to do a "manual" Navigation Log for the PPL Practical Test?

timwinters said:
Further dumbing down of america.

I guess next we'll just let the auto pilot take the checkride.
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I'm just answering the OP's question. June 15 is the effective date.

Bob
 
What's the practical value in doing navlogs by hand?

Maybe I'm missing something here (and granted, I'm a low-time pilot, not a CFI) ... but I don't see how doing it with a pencil is in any way superior to doing it with a spreadsheet or calculator or Foreflight.

As I see it, a good pilot has to plan flights accurately, period. You've got to know where you are, how much fuel you have, and how much you'll have when you land. You've got to have backup plans for everything, including if your precious electronics fail (I fly with a certified GPS, ForeFlight on the iPad, ForeFlight on the iPhone, handheld radio, and paper charts and A/FD just in case). If you use generous fuel reserves and check that your calculations are accurate, you'll be very safe.

I just don't see how spending 3 hours on paper vs. 3 minutes on ForeFlight gives you any real-world advantage.

As a training tool, I suppose it could be like high school trigonometry. I haven't used it once in real life, but supposedly it helped my brain grow in some way. Not sure it was effective :)

But as a student pilot, I always felt like the navlog was a distraction. I got so caught up in the trees — which number goes in which little box on my CFI's planning sheet — that it was harder to see the forest. "Flight planning" became about mastering one particular process that's virtually worthless in the real world. I just wonder if those many, many hours I spent planning my student cross-countries on paper would have been better spent learning something I'd actually use in the cockpit today.

I just see it as a rite of passage, or a skill to show off at the world's most boring cocktail party :)
 
TexasAviation said:
What's the practical value in doing navlogs by hand?

Maybe I'm missing something here (and granted, I'm a low-time pilot, not a CFI) ... but I don't see how doing it with a pencil is in any way superior to doing it with a spreadsheet or calculator or Foreflight.

As I see it, a good pilot has to plan flights accurately, period. You've got to know where you are, how much fuel you have, and how much you'll have when you land. You've got to have backup plans for everything, including if your precious electronics fail (I fly with a certified GPS, ForeFlight on the iPad, ForeFlight on the iPhone, handheld radio, and paper charts and A/FD just in case). If you use generous fuel reserves and check that your calculations are accurate, you'll be very safe.

I just don't see how spending 3 hours on paper vs. 3 minutes on ForeFlight gives you any real-world advantage.

As a training tool, I suppose it could be like high school trigonometry. I haven't used it once in real life, but supposedly it helped my brain grow in some way. Not sure it was effective :)

But as a student pilot, I always felt like the navlog was a distraction. I got so caught up in the trees — which number goes in which little box on my CFI's planning sheet — that it was harder to see the forest. "Flight planning" became about mastering one particular process that's virtually worthless in the real world. I just wonder if those many, many hours I spent planning my student cross-countries on paper would have been better spent learning something I'd actually use in the cockpit today.

I just see it as a rite of passage, or a skill to show off at the world's most boring cocktail party :)
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I'm a tank commander on the Abrams and I train my new crew members to navigate with a paper map even though I have a moving map GPS on a screen in my station and a portable GPS unit strapped to my machine gun mount. I also require my gunner to have more than the required knowledge about how to use his back up gun sight in case his ballistic computer or laser range finder should fail.

The point is that the basics or the old ways are important to understand because the new gadgets WILL fail and it could cost you your life. Also, if you understand how to do things manually, you can quickly cross check your electronic results because you will at least have a general idea of the proper result.
 
Whats the practical matter being able to multiply and divide by hand when there are calculators? Well, what if you don't HAVE a calculator? That IS possible you know, although with every phone having one Ill admit, its rare.

I was did a checkout with an old airline pilot. He told me to do a weight and balance on the plane before the flight. I did it all by hand and copied my table to a new page so it was nice and neat. He comes in and DIDN'T BELIEVE I had done it myself! I had to dig my scrap paper calcuations out of the waste basket to prove to him I did it. He said a LOT of pilots, most in fact that he runs into, can't do one. They knew how once, but have forgotten.
 
I do it because it is fun and I like to see how close I can figure my fuel. I also want to understand the calculations. In a way I can't explain, it just seems important to me to know how to do it. Of course I do both, and check my work against Foreflight etc. I honestly don't think it's a big deal either way.
 
TexasAviation said:
What's the practical value in doing navlogs by hand?


You've got to have backup plans for everything, including if your precious electronics fail (I fly with a certified GPS, ForeFlight on the iPad, ForeFlight on the iPhone, handheld radio, and paper charts and A/FD just in case).
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Answered your own question. Plus as a student pilot the DPE could request you to do it, in front of him, the day of the flight test, not the night before as some allow.
 
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TexasAviation said:
What's the practical value in doing navlogs by hand?

Maybe I'm missing something here (and granted, I'm a low-time pilot, not a CFI) ... but I don't see how doing it with a pencil is in any way superior to doing it with a spreadsheet or calculator or Foreflight.

As I see it, a good pilot has to plan flights accurately, period. You've got to know where you are, how much fuel you have, and how much you'll have when you land. You've got to have backup plans for everything, including if your precious electronics fail (I fly with a certified GPS, ForeFlight on the iPad, ForeFlight on the iPhone, handheld radio, and paper charts and A/FD just in case). If you use generous fuel reserves and check that your calculations are accurate, you'll be very safe.

I just don't see how spending 3 hours on paper vs. 3 minutes on ForeFlight gives you any real-world advantage.

As a training tool, I suppose it could be like high school trigonometry. I haven't used it once in real life, but supposedly it helped my brain grow in some way. Not sure it was effective :)

But as a student pilot, I always felt like the navlog was a distraction. I got so caught up in the trees — which number goes in which little box on my CFI's planning sheet — that it was harder to see the forest. "Flight planning" became about mastering one particular process that's virtually worthless in the real world. I just wonder if those many, many hours I spent planning my student cross-countries on paper would have been better spent learning something I'd actually use in the cockpit today.

I just see it as a rite of passage, or a skill to show off at the world's most boring cocktail party :)
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If you are a recreational pilot and only fly on good weather days with unlimited visibility in your own backyard, you will probably do ok.

But if you are about mastering your profession and being skilled, you start with the fundamentals. Fundamental navigation is with a compass, a stopwatch and an airspeed indicator. You can get to any point on the globe with a map and a known starting point. Learn the basics. The more you do it, the quicker it gets.

I learned how to use map, compass, watch, then ADF and VOR, then Loran (yes.. Loran) and GPS... but I always was prepared to do it on paper. Nice thing about paper and pen/pencils.. the batteries in them never fail, and never succumb to GPS outages, and never have radio interference or calibration issues. And I've had more than one electrical failure in the days before GPS phones and handheld aviation GPS's were common.

If you cant be bothered to master the fundamentals, what does that say about you as a pilot? What will you do when you are airborne and the technology doesn't work?
 
As I recall, I did my calculations the night before. During the oral examination the discussion of the log was about the selected checkpoints, the source of the assumed winds, how were the VOR station changes determined. All things that probed my understanding of the planning process, not the validity of a calculated heading.

The reality is you'll be interpolating winds aloft most of the time, based on a recent value. SWAG - Systematic Wild Arse Guess

Have the log complete and available for the discussion.

HINT: You'll discuss the Sectional quite a bit. You won't be asked to draw it.
 
I can relate to what the OP is saying. Every time I have to plan a XC, even 65 miles out and back, I feel like I must really suck at this. A few hours into planning a 30ish minute(one way) flight, I start wondering if I could've walked there by now. I think the OP was looking for is, 'how do people do this practically?' They can't be doing it the way I'm doing it! Then, the next day, the wind is different and all the numbers go out the window anyway.
 
Did all my Navlogs by hand up to and through my PPL. Maybe did ONE that way for instrument, now I just use Foreflight. I know enough about what the numbers should be and how to get them that I don't need to spend 45 minutes planning for a flight to go 30 minutes away.

However I do still keep paper charts on hand, though most of my flying I use an EFB because it's more practical, quicker and doesn't involve cross-referencing 3 different paper-bound items to quickly answer a question in flight.

Learn to do it the old-fashioned way and you will appreciate it when the batteries fail or when you need to crank out a flight plan and don't want to spend an hour programming the W&B, performance, etc for a plane you'll use one time.
 
I feel like it has less to do with "when the batteries fail" and more to do with understanding the process and how the inputs result in the outputs. Like one poster said, would it be any use at all to have a calculator if you didn't understand the basics of multiplication and division?

It reminds me of college, when I majored in psychology. My only C I ever got was in Psych Statistics, which was a pre-requisite before the class where you learned to use the computer programs that computed all the stats for you. You had to understand how to make the sausage, so to speak, before just using the computer program. No single researcher anywhere does this stuff by hand anymore, but if you didn't learn it, and the computer spit out some garbage, you might not even recognize that there was a problem.

I didn't mind grinding out the paper nav log; it was enlightening to see how much winds and deviation changed a magnetic course. And when I hit my headings and checkpoints in the air, I felt like a BOSS. And when I was off by a little bit, I got to understand shifting winds aloft and how they can change things. Will I use it after I get my PPL? Who knows. But if Foreflight spits out some weirdness at me, I will KNOW that something is up.

Now I want sausage for lunch.
 
1ZD, that's spot on.

Most of the posters have assumed dead reckoning is inaccurate. It's really not nearly as bad as people say, unless you get sloppy about calculations or execution. Remember, you only have to get close enough to each checkpoint to recognize it, 3 miles in minimal VFR. Unless your checkpoints are 200 miles apart, this isn't very hard.

CAP trains mission pilots to find search grids without GPS. I was a bit intimidated by it when I went through it, and sure enough, at mission aircrew school, I got assigned a grid 30 miles away over nearly featureless flat terrain, with only a couple of houses and minor roads to use as landmarks. I peeked at the satellite photos before leaving, and found a road and a small water tower at my grid corner, then launched the heading, airspeed and duration I'd calculated, and found that little water tower maybe 1/4 mile away from my endpoint. I was flabbergasted it could be THAT good, but I repeated it on my Form 91 checkride a few weeks later.
 
I'm going to school to be an engineer. They want me to learn calculus, ev en though there arecomputer programs that will do it for me. What gives?
 
onezuludelta said:
I feel like it has less to do with "when the batteries fail" and more to do with understanding the process and how the inputs result in the outputs. Like one poster said, would it be any use at all to have a calculator if you didn't understand the basics of multiplication and division?

It reminds me of college, when I majored in psychology. My only C I ever got was in Psych Statistics, which was a pre-requisite before the class where you learned to use the computer programs that computed all the stats for you. You had to understand how to make the sausage, so to speak, before just using the computer program. No single researcher anywhere does this stuff by hand anymore, but if you didn't learn it, and the computer spit out some garbage, you might not even recognize that there was a problem.

I didn't mind grinding out the paper nav log; it was enlightening to see how much winds and deviation changed a magnetic course. And when I hit my headings and checkpoints in the air, I felt like a BOSS. And when I was off by a little bit, I got to understand shifting winds aloft and how they can change things. Will I use it after I get my PPL? Who knows. But if Foreflight spits out some weirdness at me, I will KNOW that something is up.

Now I want sausage for lunch.
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I completely understand this - engineering school was exactly the same way...I had to grind out a million stiffness matrices by hand before we were able to use ANSYS (Finite Element Analysis program). The same was said for my AeroSystem Dynamics class - we had to to write out huge stability derivative matrices, stiffness matrices, inputs, etc before we started using MATLAB to do these quickly. The list goes on. I get it...you need to know how these things are calculated before we start using the magic black box to give us these numbers. I have done the process a handful of times now - I understand the process and how things are being calculated. Maybe my original post was a bit "harsh" - I don't know. I should have made my question short and simple. I was just curious as the King School Practical Test videos show him using DUATS Nav Log and not doing the log by hand. Thats all. As always these questions get blown way out whack on here - some posters provide excellent answers and some love to stir the pot. It doesn't matter though, my checkride is coming up soon and I seem to be doing just fine :)
 
onezuludelta said:
Sounds like high school when my parents weren't home.

HEY-O!!! I'll be here all week, folks. Tip your waitresses.
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I wasn't addressing your post as being out of whack by the way lol...I agree with your post
 
My .02 cents: While it will be acceptable to use a program to put your nav log together in June, I would recommend doing it manually. I feel that if I used a program, my DPE would have asked me more questions. Sure, you will still get questions but possibly fewer because the manual way indicates some level of proficiency and understanding. I feel your pain as it does take some time, I had to wake up really early to put mine together making a long day longer. With that being said, while flying on my checkride, the DPE had me divert to another airport as expected so i used the chart, wheel and pencil with 5nm marks on it. He then asked why I didn't use the gps in the plane and told me that I was required to know how to use all equipment on the plane. I tried to use the GPS as little as possible because i thought if he felt that i was relying on it, he would turn it off.
 
NoBShere said:
My .02 cents: While it will be acceptable to use a program to put your nav log together in June, I would recommend doing it manually. I feel that if I used a program, my DPE would have asked me more questions. Sure, you will still get questions but possibly fewer because the manual way indicates some level of proficiency and understanding. I feel your pain as it does take some time, I had to wake up really early to put mine together making a long day longer. With that being said, while flying on my checkride, the DPE had me divert to another airport as expected so i used the chart, wheel and pencil with 5nm marks on it. He then asked why I didn't use the gps in the plane and told me that I was required to know how to use all equipment on the plane. I tried to use the GPS as little as possible because i thought if he felt that i was relying on it, he would turn it off.
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During my check ride (PPL), when asked for a diversion, I looked at the chart, made a decent estimate of the direction and turned, then started to dial in the destination on the Loran (this was 2006). The DPE asked what I was doing. I told him and he said "The Loran failed. This is supposed to be pilotage." You can't win...

John
 
TexasAviation said:
What's the practical value in doing navlogs by hand?

Maybe I'm missing something here (and granted, I'm a low-time pilot, not a CFI) ... but I don't see how doing it with a pencil is in any way superior to doing it with a spreadsheet or calculator or Foreflight.

As I see it, a good pilot has to plan flights accurately, period. You've got to know where you are, how much fuel you have, and how much you'll have when you land. You've got to have backup plans for everything, including if your precious electronics fail (I fly with a certified GPS, ForeFlight on the iPad, ForeFlight on the iPhone, handheld radio, and paper charts and A/FD just in case). If you use generous fuel reserves and check that your calculations are accurate, you'll be very safe.

I just don't see how spending 3 hours on paper vs. 3 minutes on ForeFlight gives you any real-world advantage.

As a training tool, I suppose it could be like high school trigonometry. I haven't used it once in real life, but supposedly it helped my brain grow in some way. Not sure it was effective :)

But as a student pilot, I always felt like the navlog was a distraction. I got so caught up in the trees — which number goes in which little box on my CFI's planning sheet — that it was harder to see the forest. "Flight planning" became about mastering one particular process that's virtually worthless in the real world. I just wonder if those many, many hours I spent planning my student cross-countries on paper would have been better spent learning something I'd actually use in the cockpit today.

I just see it as a rite of passage, or a skill to show off at the world's most boring cocktail party :)
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Because you need to understand the workings behind foreflight, if you can't do everything it can do you're not going to be able to as easily see when it's giving you bad numbers. Do you believe children should learn basic math even though they'll always have a cell phone with a calculator on it?

If it takes you 3 hours to do a nav log by hand, that's case and point you need to invest some time to better understand the math and process.
 
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NoBShere said:
My .02 cents: While it will be acceptable to use a program to put your nav log together in June, I would recommend doing it manually. I feel that if I used a program, my DPE would have asked me more questions. Sure, you will still get questions but possibly fewer because the manual way indicates some level of proficiency and understanding. I feel your pain as it does take some time, I had to wake up really early to put mine together making a long day longer. With that being said, while flying on my checkride, the DPE had me divert to another airport as expected so i used the chart, wheel and pencil with 5nm marks on it. He then asked why I didn't use the gps in the plane and told me that I was required to know how to use all equipment on the plane. I tried to use the GPS as little as possible because i thought if he felt that i was relying on it, he would turn it off.
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Diversions are another thing. It's important to do them timely.

I ended up using MEMORY. I knew where the diversion airport was and how far it was. I didn't do that on purpose. I thought the DPE was being chatty when he asked me where Napa was. So I told him. Over there (pointing), past Oakland and up the eastern bay shore. How far? Just under 50 miles. How much fuel (now I figure out what's going on)? Low altitude through Class C, so full rich and 10 GPH. At 100 knots, 30 minutes. So, 5 gallons.
 
James331 said:
Because you need to understand the workings behind foreflight, if you can't do everything it can do you're not going to be able to as easily see when it's giving you had numbers. Do you believe children should learn basic math even though they'll always have a cell phone with a calculator on it?

If it takes you 3 hours to do a nav log by hand, that's case and point you need to invest some time to better understand the math and process.
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The first one might take that long, but I got it down to about 30 minutes by my checkride, counting recopying due to all the wind revisions. These days I know not to use quite so many waypoints.
 
If you're spending multiple hours on flight planning, you're doing something wrong. Either you just need more practice, or you're incorporating way too much information.

Remember, Private Pilot checkrides used to involve the DPE not telling you where to plan a flight to until you met for the checkride, and then you had 30 minutes to do it - including calling FSS for a weather briefing and filing a flight plan. So it can be done.

One of the problems with technology is that there is just SO much information available, it's sometimes hard to figure out what to filter out. A phone briefing back in the day would pretty much consist of a general idea of weather patterns in the area, observations and forecasts, winds aloft, and NOTAMs. That's pretty much it, so that's all you really had to concern yourself with.
 
I have had two instructors so far - the first had me do NAV log that were "bare bones"...my current instructor is great, but his approach is much more detailed. I do TAS and IAS/CAS, interpolate winds a loft for the climb out, etc...a lot of which seems pretty overkill considering the nav logs I did with my first instructor were just as accurate when I flew.

I know some people even debate whether calculating TOC is necessary (not sure what to think about that one) - I always do that.
 
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I think the answer is, it DOES take time. I think before my checkride, I got to the airport 3 hours early so I'd have time to finish it off and I still was a little rushed since we had to fly 30 mins up to the DPE.
Practice. Work out everything you can the day before but stop with blank WCAs and courses. Check winds in the morning and then don't worry too much if they change, changes in flight are part of it. Realistically, you're going to climb and pick your way from waypoint to waypoint anyway and most DPEs won't have you flying an extended time doing this.

Relax - this the fun time. It's all flying time.
 
Oh yes I do see it now
 
jsstevens said:
During my check ride (PPL), when asked for a diversion, I looked at the chart, made a decent estimate of the direction and turned, then started to dial in the destination on the Loran (this was 2006). The DPE asked what I was doing. I told him and he said "The Loran failed. This is supposed to be pilotage." You can't win...

John
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Exactly! forums like this are great if used properly. View the info as a datapoint not necessarily an absolute fact. For instance, my ppl checkride was nothing like what other people have described. I hated it and it wasn't fun. However, I have avoided posting much about it because it probably sounds like I am whining, maybe I am. I have flown with several CFIs and the differences of opinion has been eye opening. So far, I don't believe any of them were ever wrong and I have enjoyed learning from them all, some even after I got ticket for mountain flying and night brush up.
 
MAKG1 said:
Diversions are another thing. It's important to do them timely.

I ended up using MEMORY. I knew where the diversion airport was and how far it was. I didn't do that on purpose. I thought the DPE was being chatty when he asked me where Napa was. So I told him. Over there (pointing), past Oakland and up the eastern bay shore. How far? Just under 50 miles. How much fuel (now I figure out what's going on)? Low altitude through Class C, so full rich and 10 GPH. At 100 knots, 30 minutes. So, 5 gallons.
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Napa? Mine was Byron, just "around the corner"
 
NoBShere said:
Napa? Mine was Byron, just "around the corner"
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Mine was Salinas, and it went exactly as @MAKG1 discussed. That's the right way to do it imo... it's practical. None of this generate a navlog and use e6b in flight. That's dangerous.

OP, my hand-done navlogs were tedious and time-consuming. However, it's cool. Enjoy it and make the most of it. Use it as an opportunity to become fluent with the sectional. And it's kind of awesome using the plotter and drawing out different routes, etc. It might be very "retro" but there's some nostalgia and flight history there.

It's helpful to look up time / distance to climb in the POH because you'll have to do that when you fly a different type. And remember, it's all check ride prep and you may be asked about that stuff.

It's an awesome experience and an awesome journey.
 
MetalCloud said:
OP, my hand-done navlogs were tedious and time-consuming. However, it's cool. Enjoy it and make the most of it. Use it as an opportunity to become fluent with the sectional. And it's kind of awesome using the plotter and drawing out different routes, etc. It might be very "retro" but there's some nostalgia and flight history there.
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Exactly, playing with maps is FUN. It's much easier for me to explore with paper rather than electronic, because you don't have to zoom in and out. I used to have sectionals on my bedroom wall (welcome to my bedroom, pretty impressive, right LADIES?) long before I started flight training. And I recently rediscovered my passion for perusing paper maps when planning my UK honeymoon. We slapped a huge UK map on the wall and it was SO much easier to plan instead of pinching and zooming because you've got the big and small picture both available to you simultaneously without having to do anything.

Although, when bored at work, I MAY whip out Foreflight and pinch, scroll, and zoom to my little heart's content. Don't tell anyone.
 
TexasAviation said:
What's the practical value in doing navlogs by hand?
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Yeah, I mean what's the practical value of all this hand-flying nonsense. I mean we should show people how to use the autopilot and if that messes up just pull the chute. Sigh.
 
I think I had good instructors. I wasn't allowed to touch the fancy newer equipment until I could demonstrate proficiency with the traditional techniques. My first cross counties were paper charts, eyes out the window and a stopwatch. Do I fly like that now? No, but I could if I needed to.

Even with IFR training that magenta line usually "failed" or had a tendency to be attacked by post-it notes or the knobs kept magically turning to the GPS satellite status page. Only when I showed I could do everything and shoot approaches old school did we start using the autopilot with coupled LPV approaches and such. I'm very thankful for that.

My instructors were all younger so it's not like they were some stodgy old farts that didn't believe in tech. I think they were just taught well themselves. Towards the end of both PPL and IFR training becoming proficient with all the tech's features was key too, but only after old school was mastered. The new technologies are great, but they can and do fail. When they do you'll be glad you know all the old school ways (and even when the tech works being able to sense check it is incredibly important, hence why the paper flight plans are key to training).
 
TexasAviation said:
What's the practical value in doing navlogs by hand?[/QUOTE]

Examiner will want to see it. Some even require you to do it at the beginning of the practical and tell you where to plan it for (destination airport). IOW not ahead of time.
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