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Apart from some minor electronics improvements (like easier radios), that all sounds remarkably similar to my experience learning to fly twenty years ago. Still
by bergie 3y ago
Apart from some minor electronics improvements (like easier radios), that all sounds remarkably similar to my experience learning to fly twenty years ago. Still all paper charts, compass, time, VORs. Was definitely rewarding to get the navigational calculations right. Planes were the same too!
Having learned sailing in the GPS-and-chartplotter era, I sort of miss that. Time to get buy the HO tables for the sextant, I suppose…
- lsh123 3y agoI also got my license around that time with eb6, paper charts, VORs, NDB approaches, … and I don’t miss it a bit. Nostalgia - yes. But not missing it. I like to fly direct, I like to get LPV approach to 200 feet at an airport that would never ever ever would had had an ILS installed, I like traffic and weather on ADSB, I like my ForeFlight, and list goes on. The new technology helps to make flying safer. Yes, you need to know how to use all of this. And yes, it’s complicated. But the benefits are great too.
- bergie 3y agoSure, just like I’m really happy having for instance AIS for collision avoidance on the boat. I never got to fly with all the modern automations, though. Fuel prices shot up drastically around the time I got my license, and so I let it expire after a couple of years. There's a good quote in that “Children of Magenta” article: “We appear to be locked into a cycle in which automation begets the erosion of skills or the lack of skills in the first place and this then begets more automation.” Though this comment from that 2015 article aged like milk: “Airbus planes, by the way, are no more or less safe than their main rival, Boeing.”