AOPA Pilot Magazine - October 2018 - 24

PROFICIENT PILOT

Navigation, R.I.P.

BY BARRY SCHIFF

Reminiscing about the skills of yesteryear

BARRY SCHIFF

was inducted into
the National Flight
Instructor Hall of
Fame in 2003.

24 | AOPA PILOT October 2018

THE AMERICAN AIRLINES CONVAIR 240 had been sold
to Fuji Airlines in Tokyo, and it was during the ferry
flight from California to Japan in 1963 that I had my
first opportunity to test my recently acquired knowledge of celestial navigation. I was so jazzed about
finding Hawaii and Wake Island in the Pacific vastness
that I wrote an article about the possible use of celestial navigation in light airplanes. This article, my first
in any magazine, appeared in the June 1963 edition of
AOPA Pilot and was titled "Why Not Really Learn to
Navigate?" In an era when the airlines were replacing
human navigators with pilot-operated Doppler navigation systems and lightplane pilots were ecstatic about
"omniranges" displacing four-course ranges, it was not
surprising that the notion of using a war-surplus sextant
to shoot the stars in a Cessna did not become popular.
My dozen other articles about navigation (all
published in this magazine) tracked the continuing
evolution of navigation. Two early articles discussed
Doppler navigation and then Loran A-forerunner of
Loran C and more difficult to use. It had a cathoderay tube that required visually matching wriggly radio
waves to obtain lines of position that were plotted on
special charts.
My article about pressure-pattern navigation
was more useful. Differences in atmospheric pressure
between departure and destination airports are used to
calculate a single heading to use for the entire route.
This also resulted in the minimum flight time.
The dead-reckoning article was more practical
because it discussed potentially life-saving procedures
not found in many manuals. Assume, for example, that
a pilot is headed due east toward an airport on a northsouth river in an otherwise featureless desert. He arrives
at the river, but the airport is not in sight. Which way
should he turn to find the airport, north or south, and
for how long? This conundrum can be avoided by inducing a known error. The pilot turns 30 degrees north or
south of course half an hour prior to reaching the river.
He then knows which way to turn upon reaching the
river, a dead-reckoning procedure called making landfall with a known error.
Another article unraveled the mysteries of inertial navigation systems. INS was once considered the
ultimate form of navigation because it is totally selfcontained and does not rely on outside sources of
information (such as radio signals).

The world navigates now with GPS. Using satellites
instead of stars, it is the ultimate form of "celestial"
navigation. It is the only method of navigation about
which I have not written, and I likely never will. What
could I say? Anyone who can operate the moving-map
system in an automobile or the map apps on a smartphone can just as easily navigate from any point on
Earth to any other using GPS. It is difficult to imagine
navigation-if we can still call it that-getting much
easier or more accurate. Voice commands, however,
might eventually replace button pushing, such as making hands-free telephone calls in modern automobiles.
Nor will it be long before we begin using true directions. It seems archaic to base modern aerial navigation
on an elusive magnetic pole that doesn't stay still.
A danger in GPS being so reliable and so easy to use
is that pilots are becoming complacent about it. We are
losing our navigation skills. A GPS failure of some sort,
therefore, has the potential to leave a pilot in peril. My
son, Brian, a captain for a major airline, has flown with
first officers so rusty in their use of VOR that they are
challenged to track a radial. Really. No joke. When he
asks them the names of passing cities or rivers, they
often don't know-something that captains of yore
would never tolerate.
In the meantime, I still have my Bendix AN-5851-1
bubble sextant. I use it on rare occasion to maintain a semblance of celestial proficiency by taking a three-star fix
from my backyard. I am satisfied when the results show
that my home is still in Southern California and its location hasn't changed more than a hundred miles. AOPA
www.barryschiff.com

BARRY SCHIFF with his sextant in 1963.

http://www.barryschiff.com

AOPA Pilot Magazine - October 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - October 2018