So I was done reading Mac's article in July SportAviation and came away both vehemently disagreeing with him and acknowledging his points, something that's routine with me when I read his stuff.
His initial point was that teaching the standard waypoint and sectional navigation methods and torturing students with the mysteries of the E-6B is out of sync with how folks actually fly and should be removed from the syllabus and the standards for the checkride.
His example of a student being forced to make reference checkmarks every ten miles had me guffawing - that's not the standard I was taught and counter productive, as he pointed out. Checkmarks should be where they're needed and easily found, distance dictated by both the landmark itself, the speed of the aircraft, and visibility. On my cross country I used just three - an initial to point me in the right direction, a mountain that was right off my path three quarters the way, and a lake that set me up for my destination. I had some "fall back" points should visibility suddenly vanish (meaning I'd most likely divert or turn around), but for aiming and location tracking they were spread out enough so that I wasn't focused on the map, and tied more for diversions and location than anything else. For my checkride I got lucky and the evaluator put my mythical destination pretty close to what I had actually flown and he okay'd my plan once I explained it to him.
Mac's right - those of us in the paper map on the kneeboard ranks are getting thin, and most folks are using some sort of GPS to navigate with (and I'll confess to using the original GPS of roads and railroad tracks). He's also right that the rare chance of GPS failure is often overstated.
And I've never seen anyone whip out a whizzwheel once they get their plastic card.
What he's missing, IMHO, are the critical learning skills that come hand and glove with the old 'analog' methods we still demand of students.
It's not the how of plotting a course by hand using a sectional, scale, and E-6B that's important so much as the why of the tasks. Pick a point that will point you in the general direction of your flight. Crosswinds will effect not only your inflight bearing, but your ground speed. What's the backup plan - where are the diversion points, and when is it best to turn around to get to the closest ones? What sort of terrain is on the path if one has to put it down off airport? Hands-on-the-map training is the best way for a person to cement the ideas into the head; when he winds up pushing the NST button on the GPS when he needs to divert he'll have a basis for making the best decision of what's presented.
The E-6B is as archaic as the slide rule because that's precisely what it is! What it lacks in technological savvy it makes up for in visual relationships, however. Miles to knots relationship obvious the first time one converts. Airspeed +/- wind = groundspeed = time of flight over distance = fuel consumption....laid out on thin cardboard with the numbers sliding past each other. Flip it over and make the dots, turning with the wind to show one's actual heading, a perfect visual and tactile representation of the concept.
He's missed the point on ground reference maneuvers, which he said should be dumped in favor of precision flight - defined as flying precisely straight and level on a given heading. I see Mac's point, since he's coming at it from the perspective of a person who thinks of aircraft as transportation; for an IFR kind of guy, flying on a particular path in the sky is a critical task. But he misses the purpose of the rectangular pattern or circle around a point; they're to show a pilot can perform well in the portion of flight that sees the most fatalities - the pattern. It's the same for slow flight; a pilot that can't perform slow flight well is a good candidate for the infamous spin-at-base-to-final and a ground loop if in a conventional aircraft. S turns over a road are really about turning downwind to base and base to final in a crosswind, when one thinks about it.
I'm not in the I-Hate-Mac camp, and his blog has improved immensely to speak to the EAA audience, but this time I'll respectfully disagree with him. Am I off the mark, playing the dinosaur because I'm an analog pilot?
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Originally Posted by WLIU
