As I mentioned in a comment upthread, I was trained in navigation as a Merchant Marine officer and we were not allowed to use electronic calculators during exam

As I mentioned in a comment upthread, I was trained in navigation as a Merchant Marine officer and we were not allowed to use electronic calculators during exams. The reason given was "what if you're in the middle of the ocean and your batteries die?" or something stupid like that. But the real reason was that our instructor wanted us to think about what we were doing. Celestial navigation involves a lot of steps and errors compound. Forcing you to think clearly about the intermediate results means that you're more likely to realize you pulled the wrong number out of a table, or your star sight was just plain wrong and you're not off the coast of Madagascar, but somewhere near the Azores instead.