route planning

fiveoboy01 said:
Someday I will be as awesome of a pilot as you, Ed. Until then, I will let the AP and GPS do the work for me. They still fly the airplane better than you can. :)
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I hope your AP never glitches.

I've had some "fun" in a GFC700. I've had older one-axis autopilots that fly continuous S turns. You don't let that fly the plane if you want your passengers and their lunch to remain connected. You don't let any autopilot fly the plane in moderate turbulence.

You gotta be able to function without the gizmos.
 
azure said:
Minor point: actually, there is (or was) one flight planning problem in the test bank where on one of the legs, the only way to get the distance is with a straightedge since the chart doesn't show a DME distance for that leg. I think it was somewhere in Oregon; not sure since it's been a long time.
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It may still be there (at least let month when I took the written). I had one that no matter how I worked it out I didn't get any of the possible answers. I used the lengths printed on the chart but one segment was sort of ambiguous. I did't try using a straight edge.

John
 
fiveoboy01 said:
He's doing IFR training. He should have learned how to do all those basics on paper during primary.

I don't do anything on paper. All my flight planning is done on the EFB, fuel burn, wind correction, ETE... and it's super easy. I know that makes you and(especially) Ed mad, but I don't care.
I even (GASP) do W&B with ForeFlight. I don't even know where my E6B is... How do you like that? Call me a Magenta child, I don't care. I know how to work smarter, not harder.

Good God, I suppose I should be required to always hand fly with a single VOR IFR.
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IFR flight planning is a little different then VFR flight planning, as you should know.

I use FF and FltPlan for my planning, filing, briefs, W&Bs too, but I'm a professional ATP, during all my training, 0-CPL and later my CFI, I did it all by hand, I didn't use the E6B, just a normal calculator (figured I already have proven I can do basic math as an college grad ;) ). For my IFR I did everything in a non GPS aircraft with two VOR heads and a crap AI, or a sim, I didn't have a tablet or anything ether, I believe I became a much better pilot for it.
 
MAKG1 said:
I hope your AP never glitches.

I've had some "fun" in a GFC700. I've had older one-axis autopilots that fly continuous S turns. You don't let that fly the plane if you want your passengers and their lunch to remain connected. You don't let any autopilot fly the plane in moderate turbulence.

You gotta be able to function without the gizmos.
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Indeed.

There is a place for the AP, but it's not all the time and no, in many instances it WONT fly the plane better then a man, especially when things are not ideal, this is true of the little stec in my plane and the slightly more robust unit in the turboprop I fly for work.
 
EdFred said:
A lot of you can't even make a 75 mile flight without your magenta blanket. What happens when it goes TU and you don't have a chute to pull?
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75 miles? Hell Thats local. "Look out the window as point the airplane in the general direction and look for the landmarks" range. LOL.
 
MAKG1 said:
I hope your AP never glitches.

I've had some "fun" in a GFC700. I've had older one-axis autopilots that fly continuous S turns. You don't let that fly the plane if you want your passengers and their lunch to remain connected. You don't let any autopilot fly the plane in moderate turbulence.

You gotta be able to function without the gizmos.
Click to expand...

Yeah, because I can't hand fly. At all.
 
Y'all are funny. Is there a thread here on PoA that was NOT hijacked and didn't result in insults being thrown multiple directions? :D

FWIW, when I fly with non-pilot friends, I try to show them a little bit about aviation. (no, not "teach", "show" - that is generally accepted better, LOL)
I show how I can easily punch in the destination airport and follow a cool magenta line.
I also show them the sectional chart and the airport depicted just south of the tip of the lake, right past the road .... and I point at it out the window and they usually accept that as a good method of navigation. Or maybe I just have/choose smart friends, I don't know.
 
Well since this thread already done got hijacked....

Why fltplan.com? I personally think SkyVector is prettier. And navplan does a good job with altitudes.
 
FWIW I agree with both sides in this one. Being able to do the calculations without flight planning software means you understand the data from charts and weather forecasts (magnetic variation, wind velocities, etc.) and you definitely are handicapped if you don't at least understand what the data means! But once you do, I see no reason to continue to do it that way. Toward the end of my IFR training I wrote a navlog spreadsheet in Excel that does all the calculations and outputs ETE and fuel burned. I trust it more than I trust ForeFlight's calculations since I know the assumptions my code makes and I have to input the forecast winds; I'm not sure if ForeFlight does reasonable calculations for climb and descent segments even now, and I'm not sure where it gets forecast winds from. Still, I only use it for long flights where I expect to be well under half tanks at my destination. If there's no question whether I might be pushing my plane's range for a particular flight, I just use ForeFlight and take its output numbers with a grain of salt.

And yeah, Ed is quite right about people that can't multiply two numbers on paper. I see them in my classes all the time. The current generation of students seems to be largely dependent on calculators for even simple arithmetic. Scary thought, for sure...
 
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