Navigation strategy on a short flight

In article ,
says...


writes:

Sure sounds like a realistic "simulation" to me...

I agree.


I have to agree as well.
An inept pilot, with no real understanding of flight planning or
navigation, launches on a VFR trip without any plan for how to execute
the flight and no tools to monitor progress. The result is he gets
behind the airplane, gets completely lost, executes bungling routing
maneuvers to try to get oriented and ATC has to intervene to clean up
the mess before he become a danger to himself and others. MSFS did a
fairly good job of showing this pilot how inept he was.

Does MSFS have an NTSB reporting function?

FlyCherokee writes:

In addition to considering the max elevations of peaks, ridges,
towers, etc in the area, I generally like about 3000 AGL minimum for
safety in case of engine failure. That doesn't necessarily mean 3000
over the highest thing in the area, but 3000 over the predominant
terrain level (to leave enough gliding time and range)

Point taken. Does this depend on the type of terrain or do you apply it as a
universal rule? Or do you relate it to the number of suitable airfields within
range?

I had not given engine failure much thought. Most of this comes from the
complacency that results when one knows that the engine cannot fail (in a sim,
failures occur only if the sim has been set to allow them). Here again, I note
that if I had stuck to my original filed altitude, I'd have about eight miles
of gliding range, which, along my originally filed route, would keep me within
range of an airfield for the entire flight. So I have another reason not to
cut corners on the altitude. The terrain is moderately smooth in the area and
flat spots for an emergency landing probably wouldn't be too hard to find from
any position along the original route, but I do not relish the thought of
crashing through sagebrush on desert dirt.

I note that had I taken the 148 radial directly, I'd be further away from
suitable airfields (although that was not something that I had noticed or
taken into consideration during flight planning).

You should work this into your sim flying. It is one of the
differences between actual flying and simulator experience: In actual
flight training, a flight instructor would emphasize the importance of
a nav log, and would not let you fly cross country without one. You
would feel the need yourself, because being lost (for real) in a small
airplane is a scary and life-threatening situation; sooner or later
the fuel is going to run out and you are going to land, if not on a
runway, then somewhere, but you are surely coming down. It's very
important (and just plain good airmanship) to always know where you
are, and the nav log is one of the basic tools for doing this.

I'll look at some navigation logs and see what I can integrate into
simulation. Maybe I'll make my own (I like electronic publishing), since it
doesn't look like there is any standard. The ones I've seen have been very
busy.

Anyway, it is possible to become spooked during a simulation, too, if you are
able to suspend disbelief and use a bit of imagination. If you aren't,
simulation probably won't be enjoyable and won't provide much in the way of
learning or useful experience.

On occasions when I have been scared by a simulation, it has been when I got
into trouble or crashed because of some mistake I made. The behavior of the
sim was exactly like real life within the context of the mistake, and it
occurred to me that if I had made the same mistake in real life, I'd be dead,
which is a sobering thought. The incident that sticks in my mind was a flight
during which I had become just a bit too complacent, allowing me to hit the
side of a hill not long after takeoff (at night). All I saw was some trees and
bushes suddenly right ahead of me, and then boom. In the postmortem analysis I
saw what I had done wrong, but it significantly upset me because it was clear
that there was no error in the simulation that I could use to pretend that it
wasn't my fault--in real life, I would have hit that hill just as surely as I
did in the sim, and for exactly the same reasons. The sim did a superb job of
simulating my demise.

If you think you have little room on your table for writing, then
please go to your local small airport and ask to sit in a 172. Then
imagine getting jerked around in turbulence while trying to unfold and
refold a sectional chart, while computing wind speed on the E6B, and
updating you nav log on a tiny clipboard that's strapped to your right
leg, all while maintaining course and altitude and scanning for
traffic!

You make it sound like quite an ordeal. I hope you are describing a worst-case
scenario.

If I were flying for real, probably one of my first investments would be an
electronic flight bag, in order to eliminate some of that clutter and
confusion. Ideally an EFB that I could write on would be great (but I don't
think such exists at the moment).

The clock and compass are your most fundamental nav tools, and
certainly you can estimate your ground speed! I think your missing
some of the most fun parts of navigating!; i.e., a course line on a
chart, a compass, a clock, and a bunch of waypoints to check your
position/speed and progress.

I'll try some exercises with a clock. Up to now, I've only very rarely used
timing for navigation, mostly in holds. Usually the aircraft is equipped well
enough to make it unnecessary, with the exception of the C152.

Or, better, get yourself an
E6B flight computer which will calculate this and the actual wind.
Then you use that calculated wind to recompute the predicted times to
your subsequent waypoints.

I have an E6B, but it's very awkward to use. I have two little programs for my
PDA that also perform calculations, but that's a bit awkward, too. But I guess
I can try them again.

Use ground features for waypoints, e.g., crossing rivers, lakes,
highways, etc.

I usually do okay with pilotage. The sim does not have breathtaking scenery,
but the developers included most of the features you need to relate the
terrain outside to the charts, making pilotage perfectly practical. If you see
a highway and some power lines on the charts, you'll see them in the sim, too.
Rivers rarely look as they do in real life, but you can still spot them and
relate them to the charts.

If there is nothing suitable, then use crossing VOR
radials as waypoints.

If I have two VOR receivers! My pokey little C152 has but one.

If none of those, then I would chart a different course so that I
had something to verify my position.

I've done this in the past for pure pilotage. It seems to work pretty well.

Today's winds-aloft forecasts are more than good enough for
navigation. Also, you will directly calculate the winds at your
altitude when you reach your first waypoint.

But if you need to know winds aloft (hence ground speed) to find your first
waypoint ...

So you're saying that the winds aloft I get from NOAA are pretty good? The
pages I found lack resolution, though--they show the whole United States, and
I'd like to have more precise winds just for my flight route. There's a Java
applet for that but it's not much of an improvement.

For 40 or 50 dollars, I think Flight Simulator does a remarkably good
job in this area.

And with a few add-ons, you can improve it by at least an order of magnitude
or better. Some flight controls are a good investment, and payware add-on
aircraft are very important, since the default aircraft involve many
deliberate compromises in order to reach a wider market.

writes:

He is sadly mistaken as it does not accurately mirror results IN A
REAL PLANE.

That depends on the situation. In many simulation scenarios, your experience
in the simulation precisely mirrors what it would be in real life. In
particular, this means that if you make a foolish mistake in the simulated
flight and kill yourself, you would also be dead in real life ... you cannot
claim that some error in the simulation is responsible for the crash.

I pity real-world pilots who continually dismiss simulation. They do
themselves a disservice. Since the prevent themselves from learning from
mistakes in a simulator, the only way they can learn from mistakes is in a
real airplane--and if the mistake leads to impact with terrain, learning from
it at that point is too late.

Mxsmanic wrote:
writes:

Sure sounds like a realistic "simulation" to me...

I agree.

Let's add sarcasm to the list of things about which you know little to
nothing.

Sitting in front of a small table in a dark room with the only illumination
being from a computer monitor is not a realistic simulation of flying an
airplane.


--
Jim Pennino

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VOR-DME wrote:
In article ,
says...


writes:

Sure sounds like a realistic "simulation" to me...

I agree.


I have to agree as well.
An inept pilot, with no real understanding of flight planning or
navigation, launches on a VFR trip without any plan for how to execute
the flight and no tools to monitor progress. The result is he gets
behind the airplane, gets completely lost, executes bungling routing
maneuvers to try to get oriented and ATC has to intervene to clean up
the mess before he become a danger to himself and others. MSFS did a
fairly good job of showing this pilot how inept he was.

In that respect, yes, it was a good simulation of a clueless naif trying
to fly an airplane.


--
Jim Pennino

Remove .spam.sux to reply.

Hi,


In article ,
wrote:
If there is nothing suitable, then use crossing VOR
radials as waypoints.

If I have two VOR receivers! My pokey little C152 has but one.

You can do a VOR cross perfectly well with a single NAV radio.

Andy

In rec.aviation.piloting Mxsmanic wrote:

I'll look at some navigation logs and see what I can integrate into
simulation. Maybe I'll make my own (I like electronic publishing), since it
doesn't look like there is any standard. The ones I've seen have been very
busy.

I posted you a link to some PDF ones months ago, which you chose to ignore
as you couldn't be bothered with such useless paperwork.

Since you haven't a clue how they are used, saying you will make your own
is laughable.

They are "very busy" because there is a lot of information that has to go
on them and the well formatted ones will print on standard paper and fold
up conviently to fit a knee board. Real airplanes don't have a table in the
cockpit.


--
Jim Pennino

Remove .spam.sux to reply.

On Jul 5, 7:00*am, Andy Hawkins wrote:
Hi,

In article ,
* * * * * wrote:

If there is nothing suitable, then use crossing VOR
radials as waypoints.

If I have two VOR receivers! *My pokey little C152 has but one.

You can do a VOR cross perfectly well with a single NAV radio.

But only in a real aeroplane...

In article ,
Mxsmanic wrote:

So you're saying that the winds aloft I get from NOAA are pretty good? The
pages I found lack resolution, though--they show the whole United States, and
I'd like to have more precise winds just for my flight route. There's a Java
applet for that but it's not much of an improvement.

Aviationweather.gov is a good start. Here, for example, are winds aloft
forecast for PHX and others in the region:

http://aviationweather.gov/products/...e&fint=06&lvl=
lo

You can also get point sounding forecasts from NOAA's ARL:

http://ready.arl.noaa.gov/READYcmet.php

Put "PHX" into the box there and then get a sounding forecast with the
12km NAM model, and pick the Javascript animation type.

In my experience these are highly accurate up to a day in advance, and
reasonably accurate up to two days in advance.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon

On Jul 4, 3:00*pm, Andy Hawkins wrote:
Hi,

In article ,
* * * * * wrote:

If there is nothing suitable, then use crossing VOR
radials as waypoints.

If I have two VOR receivers! *My pokey little C152 has but one.

You can do a VOR cross perfectly well with a single NAV radio.

Andy

This sim flyer thinks, from about 2400 feet above ground level he has
an 8 mile gliding range in a 152. No CFI would sign off on a pilot who
was aiming at a field 8 miles away. At best there would be only 1500
feet of vertical allowed before a pilot had better be over the
intended unimproved field rather than stalling in on short final to a
nice airport 8 miles away.

This same sim flyer thinks our circular slide rules are difficult to
use. Would any CFI sign a student off on a solo cross country who
could not use one?

Or sign off a student or pass someone on their BFI who found it
inconvenient to have a flight plan on something other than pattern
work or to and from the practice area?

Or who found it 'awkward' to keep a written howgozit flight log during
a flight? (Some of you may find this worth doing. My steno pads have a
sheet devoted to flight plan, wx notes, clearance, and en route notes
including updated etas and changes. I have a stack of those, and can
'relive' any flight I where I was PIC from about my 200 hours total
time point until now by looking at the notes. Once you adopt a format
it's easy and automatic, and the spiral spring is a neat place to hold
a pencil.)

Who here needs to be lectured by someone who is so far removed from
the basics of flying?