Judah writes:

Yes. When you are driving, how do you ensure that you are maintaining a
safe distance from the guardrail, or from the car in front of or next to
you? How about from a Stop Sign or Traffic Light?

By looking out the window. I don't search for traffic lights or
guardrails on a map. If I did, I'd be tumbling down a mountainside in
no time.

Do you do this equally as well as you did the first time you got into a
car?

Pretty much, yes.

Do you need a GPS to do this?

No.

The same sort of judgement of distances is possible when piloting an
airplane. Someone who learns to fly in the real worlds learns to discern
three dimensions and estimate distance.

Depth perception doesn't work at distances of more than 15 metres or
so, so the same cues one uses in the real world also work in
simulation.

Unfortunately, this cannot be effectively done on a two-dimensional
simulator screen.

See above. It is done routinely. Additionally, full-motion
simulators use collimated projections that place everything at optical
infinity, and they work very well indeed, even though there is no
depth perception at all.

Careful calculation is not required.

It's required if the chart doesn't tell you at a glance how to
determine the boundaries of the airspace.

And certainly there is no harm in leaving yourself a bit of lattitude
if you don't have tools to do it with exacting precision.

Except when you have forbidden areas threatening on both sides.

I wonder if the advent of moving-map navigation aids has made pilots
more prone to fly closely between and around controlled airspaces.
Certainly it seems like a practical advantage of such devices,
provided that they don't fail.

I use an EHSI to fly patterns in the sim, but that is mainly because
it's so hard to look out the side windows (I hope--at least I hope
that visibility is a _lot_ better in a real aircraft).

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