"Cecil Chapman" wrote
If anybody thinks it's really silly for me to do IFR training with only
1 comm and 1 nav I'd guess I'd like to hear that.

To borrow an old analogy,,,, you can do it, but you'll be busier than "a
one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest",,,, especially when you have to
identify a VOR intersection (that is one that is defined by intersecting
radials of two VORs).

You know, people told me the same thing. These were people who HAD
done it, but only as a special training exercise designed to increase
workload. When I started my instrument training, it was diffcult at
first - and then it wasn't.

Being limited to a single VOR made me realize that I couldn't
cross-check ALL the time - so I didn't. Instead, I started to
cross-check when I needed it - and I discovered that I really didn't
need to do it all that often. Why not? Well, my situational
awareness improved. I began to think in terms of what the crosscheck
was telling me - and it told me a lot more than "You're not there
yet." If the needle is four dots out on a VOR that's 20 nm away,
there's no point crosschecking 30 seconds from now. Why not? Well,
at 20 nm every degree is 1/3 nm. Four dots is 8 degrees, or 8/3 nm.
That's almost 3 nm. At 90 kts, it will be 90 seconds before it
centers. Checking sooner than a minute from now is a waste.
Realistically, once you develop situational awareness, 3-4 crosschecks
will be plenty - and that's not too hard, especially if you have a
flip-flop.

Dead reckoning is the basis of all navigation - everything else is
just a crosscheck. The more limited your ability to cross-check is,
the better your dead reckoning skills will become.

Training with minimum equipment makes for maximum skill - a skill
level you never achieve if you don't train that way. Does it take a
little longer? Sure, but you're flying your own airplane so the
marginal costs are minimal. And it makes sense to train to that
standard - that way, when you do it for real and have the GPS going,
it's a lot easier in real life. What's more, you're not lost when the
GPS goes TU.

Michael