I taught XC Ground School for several years. We covered the basics of course selection, navigation, off-field landings, etc. At one point, we fooled around with the old-style whiz-wheels and some of the underlying calculations using spreadsheet tables to illustrate the finer points of glide angles, headwinds/tailwinds, speeds to fly, etc.

The week after the whiz-wheel exercise, one of the students shows up at the next class all excited to share with us his creation (be forewarned - he's an engineer). He had created a slide rule of sorts using rigid plastic, sliding windows, and a graph. He had mapped out the airports (public use and private) for a silver distance flight using a 1-26. If you "just slide this bar here, input the McCready speed by moving this here, use the lookup table to find the airports in range here after applying a safety margin here..." The device was about 2 feet square and insanely complicated. We had a good laugh, but it did bring home the point. The first XC flights aren't so much about finely calculated maneuvers as they are about having faith in the sky ahead of you and the fields around you. Loose rules of thumb and general awareness of location are usually good enough given the broader uncertainties mother nature throws at you.

P3

On Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:16:41 AM UTC-4, Surge wrote:
With my limited experience of soaring, using maps, slide rules, etc. while soaring is plain stupid in this day and age in my opinion.

There just isn't time to do finicky calculations while you should be scanning for other traffic and looking where you're flying, where the next source of lift is, where's the next possible outlanding field, etc.

If the GPS should fail so what? You already have a suitable outlanding location identified and you've already got a good idea of which direction you're flying and how far you're likely to glide so what is the problem?

A map and "old school tools" isn't likely to make you glide any further and it certainly won't automatically select a suitable outlanding spot for you.

If anything it will keep your eyes busy inside the cockpit while you fly yourself into trouble.



Use a GPS and "fly the plane".