"Dan Luke" wrote
What you are seeing are the death throes of an obsolescent technology. It's
not a pretty picture.

You mean like the taildragger? It's been obsolete for decades, but
10% of my total time is tailwheel time.

Due to bureaucratic wishy-washiness, the FAA won't go
ahead and put NDB/ADF out of its misery, preferring to let the condemned
twist slowly in the wind.

That's because at many airports (including my home field) the only
alternative is GPS - too expensive, and with a user interface not
ready for prime time.

Expert practitioners cling to their skills
because, well, they're experts.

No, becaue it's the only way they have to use many airports. Half my
actual approaches are NDB. My enthusiasm for spending a lot of time
and money and reducing the redundancy in my airplane (I would have to
remove either the ADF or LORAN to add an IFR GPS to my panel) is very
low. Thus I'm glad the FAA keeps the NDB approach alive.

So we are in the neither-here-nor-there limbo you describe. It's kind of
like the time when pocket calculators were replacing slide rules. The senior
engineer at Honeywell would snort when he saw the cubs using their TI's:
"What are you gonna do if that dam' toy quits on you?" It turned out not to
be a problem.

Actually, as a senior engineer at one of Honeywell's big competitors,
I can tell you that it IS a problem. Not the toy quitting, but the
absolute lack of understanding of certain concepts (most obviously
significant figures) in the new crop of engineers who were never
forced to master the slide rule. It's not that you CAN'T teach these
concepts without a slide rule - but with the calculators, you can get
by with not teaching them.

Meanwhile, look at your whizwheel and tell me slide rules are
obsolete.

Michael