Please explain why it's irresponsible.

Well, I think I gave the reason. Remember the two bozos flying over Washington, DC and how much they hurt all
of us?

They did that because they were incompetent, not because they didn't
have a GPS. I've flown for half a century in the Middle Atlantic
states, which are full of various kinds of special use airpspace, and
managed to stay out of trouble. So have thousands --perhaps tens of
thousands -- of other pilots.

Simple map reading skills would have kept those "bozos" out of
trouble. The had only to stay on the correct side of a sizeable
river; they failed to do it. If they coulnd't read a sectional, why do
you suppose they could have read a GPS screen?

Airliners have other RNAV equipment.
I asked a retired American Airlines 747 captain about this at lunch
today. He said that until 1990 or '95, the planes he flew had only
"basic" instruments; inferior to the equipment in many private
aircraft.

The poster said he NEEDED a GPS. That suggests dependency.

Not to me.

Well, I'm "depending" on the definition of the word in the dictionary.

I don't know. Sounds a lot like the "When I was young, x was better" fallacy.

Some things were, some things were not.

The old Adcock ranges were not better than VORs; ADF approaches (as
we then called them) were not better than the ILS. But some things,
such as the average private pilot's pilotage skills, certainly were.
They had little or nothing else to get them to their destination.

vince norris