rant mode
Having earned my instrument rating and done all my flying behind panels
that do NOT include an IFR GPS, I frequently find myself a little
queasy when I read these posts about GPS approaches.

I'm a young man (33) and am a professional in the computer industry (or
was, until I decided to go back to grad school) and yet, I find the
complexity of operating a GPS just plain outrageous. I've rented
aircraft with panel GPS and fiddled with the simulators on my PC and I
always come away with this feeling of "argggh!" this is way too hard.

I think the people who invented these panel units (or set up the IFR
certification for them) seriously screwed up by not fully appreciating
what was good about the old nav radios. To me, the nice thing is that
using a nav radio is NOT A NEGOTIATION. You set it and that's that. You
can do it ahead of time. You can change it at any time, without
updating a plan, etc. You can put a frequency in there long before what
appears on the nav head will make sense -- and that's okay. You as the
pilot get to decide when to look at the needle. With these GPS systems
it seems like you are constantly dealing with the after-effects of some
engineer/programmer who is not in the air with you.

Oh, and here's another nice thing about nav radios. They look and work
the same in a 737 and a 152. But god forbid you jump into an aircraft
with a different GPS unit than the one you're familiar with. You're
gonna be in trouble!

I dunno. I get what's great about GPS. I have a handheld (196) and like
it. (And it's flightplan logic is substantially easier than a 430/530,
btw).

Aviation used to represent the cutting edge in human factors research.
What happened?

/rant mode

-- dave j