On Tuesday, November 3, 2020 at 4:04:03 PM UTC-5, Chip Bearden wrote:
On Tuesday, November 3, 2020 at 2:32:30 PM UTC-5, Roy B. wrote:
Anybody remember what a "prayer wheel" was?
When did you last see one?
ROY

I still have one in my cockpit (cardboard, homemade, ca 1978) to check against the nav computer. And I do fairly often, ever since a bug in GNII caused me to land a few miles short at New Castle years ago. The TP in the last cylinder was still miles away and I was over glide path where I was when I said "don't push it" and tapped "turn here" to go home safely. Immediately I was 500' below glide. WTF? Response from the developer was classic: "That shouldn't happen," the second-most dangerous phrase in IT (the #1 being "it SHOULD work").

Anyway, whether it's 5 or 6 miles per thousand or a prayer wheel or whatever, it pays to common sense this stuff. In the old days, that's all we had..

And, yeah, preparing paper maps (which I still do), peering out anxiously at the desolation trying to find Caprock Station at Hobbs or Gabbs at Minden, or wondering how far along the last leg you were gliding into Lancaster, SC over farms and trees, or using Excel in the van to desperately convert a non-functional contest TP file from degree-minutes-seconds to decimal degrees (or vice versa, it was a long time ago) was a hassle.

But as RO says, when you took navigation off the table, it changed the competitive mix. Two good pilots landed out at that Lancaster (nee Chester) contest when they got lost. When GPS came along not long after, it was a great equalizer for them, not so good for me. Oh, well.

The title of this was Old Folks Poll so I figure P3 and I are allowed to complain. LOL

Chip Bearden
JB

I last built a prayer wheel (Stocker type calculator, as described in Reichmann's book) when I got my current glider, 10 years ago. I carry it in the cockpit as a backup, but never actually use it.

That project was a marriage of the old tech and the new tech: I wrote some software that, given a polar, create a PDF file with the needed curves. Print it on a transparency (if you can find one!) and add the numbers by hand and you're done. Scaled for the underlying sectional map. If anybody's interested in such, send me the polar and I'll make you the PDF.

I do worry about the lack of navigation skills in the newer pilots (whether young or old), and have spent some time pondering how to teach them to, at least, sanity-check what they think the glide computer is telling them.