Maintaining VFR altitudes when following N/S roads/rivers

On Aug 24, 8:09*pm, Mxsmanic wrote:
BT writes:
What you are doing is not pilotage.
Fly a straight line based on compass and wind correction computations.
Time between visual points, towns, bridges, etc to compute ground speed..
Correct the heading slightly based on "observations" from pilotage.

just following a meandering river or road is not pilotage.

Pilotage is supposedly navigation by visual landmarks, which presumably
includes roads and rivers. *Successful pilotage implies that you can navigate
with just the visual features and a chart. *If you are using calculations to
determine your position, it's more like dead reckoning. *I do try to navigate
that way, too, but periodically I like to practice navigation by visual
features on the land below alone.

Well,, well,, chalk one up for the desktop pilot and one down for BT!

On Aug 25, 9:46 am, Ricky wrote:
On Aug 24, 8:09 pm, Mxsmanic wrote:

BT writes:
What you are doing is not pilotage.
Fly a straight line based on compass and wind correction computations.
Time between visual points, towns, bridges, etc to compute ground speed.
Correct the heading slightly based on "observations" from pilotage.

just following a meandering river or road is not pilotage.

Pilotage is supposedly navigation by visual landmarks, which presumably
includes roads and rivers. Successful pilotage implies that you can navigate
with just the visual features and a chart. If you are using calculations to
determine your position, it's more like dead reckoning. I do try to navigate
that way, too, but periodically I like to practice navigation by visual
features on the land below alone.

Well,, well,, chalk one up for the desktop pilot and one down for BT!

For what it's worth, pilotage is sweaty finger on a chart, point to
point flying. Dead reckoning is a corruption of the phrase deduced
reckoning, and comes about from the sailing days where one would
attempt to take into account all of the influences on the track over
the bottom -- wind, currents, estimated speed and so on, to deduce
where one would be at a given time. In a way a NDB approach has a lot
of dead reckoning built into the procedure. The pilot knows where the
airplane was when it crosses over the beacon, and taking into account
wind drift and a hint of wind velocity as learned from the procedure
turn inbound, 'deduces' where the airport might be. If the deductions
and piloting is correct, when (s)he looks up after the correct amount
of time passes by, the airport should be right there. I am so glad I
don't have to fly many NDB approaches any more. None precision indeed!