Never go flying without an up to date chart!

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Mrs Ex-Ascot
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Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#1 Post by Mrs Ex-Ascot » Tue Jun 13, 2017 10:37 am

Never go flying without an up to date chart! Or to put it another way, never rely on your GPS AND don't refer to any chart at all! * :-o

Silly person was lucky not to crash and burn. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... field.html Well, thankfully he only did the crash bit. :D

*I am assuming that he didn't have a chart as he was so reliant on his GPS with the non existent airfield.
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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#2 Post by Boac » Tue Jun 13, 2017 11:03 am

Surely Trump is older than 53?

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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#3 Post by Bob » Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:21 pm

"The pilot, who holds a US flying licence"

.........................My first thought was Benthere, but 53?...reckon Merrikan tap water must be loaded with Aluminium

(or perhaps Bauxite)
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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#4 Post by unifoxos » Sun Apr 01, 2018 7:56 am

Or an alternate? However it seems getting lost wasn't his problem - it appears he couldn't fly or experienced a catastrophic failure, if the Mail is to be believed:-

"The plane plummeted to the ground"
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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#5 Post by fin » Wed Apr 25, 2018 2:55 pm

I think the total global number is now around six thousand, but in my own personal world and experience, there are now 13 airports on the island I call home which no longer exist, but which did when I began flying*. Makes me very sad it does.

* or within the lifetime of my folks
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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#6 Post by Cacophonix » Sat Apr 28, 2018 5:33 am

I did something I never normally do and switched the GPS in an aircraft I was flying on as I was in an aircraft with a full instrument deck that included Bendix King and Garmin kit last weekend. I included the Garmin GPS in a full instrument check before the flight home and lo and behold the software, maps, way points, radio aids information had not been updated since 2002! I switched it off again and resolved to favour the old steam driven approach, HSI etc. that all checked out fine should I need it. How many club aircraft that are mostly flown VFR but boast all the mod cons have actually had the map software updated and the instrument calibrated etc? Most of the GPS's soon become just dead weight and not legally useable!

Of course the information that is shown on up to date charts or in the GPS map updates is not always useful at first glance either. For example Kirkbride is listed as a micro light field and may be dismissed by the hard pressed pilot flying something bigger in extremis but it can actually safely handle/manage much bigger traffic such as the A400M, one of which put down there for some practice recently.

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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#7 Post by fin » Mon Apr 30, 2018 3:41 pm

This little guy went with me literally around the world. On the leg from Katmandu to Dubai, the captain borrowed it and put it on his glare shield to check it against the "hundred thousand dollars of instruments which won't do that" .

He was right too. For instance, those seven buttons could give you the sun position for any time and date at any location on earth, past present or future. Very useful if you were trying to avoid landing with sun smack in the middle of your landing runway. (Or even finding your way off the Accropolis in the middle of the day if you got turned around walking there).

There were 6,000 airports in the data base, and like many which came later, a single push could give you bearing and distance to the nearest ten. Hoped you would never need it, but damn useful when you did! When it went west, I was very sad.
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Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#8 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Wed May 16, 2018 11:35 am

I still have my Trimble, and it still works!!

First got it to fly Arizona to Israel ferry of a C152 in 1994. It was my backup gps for sailing the Atlantic in 2008.

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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#9 Post by John Hill » Tue Aug 21, 2018 7:24 am

No GPS for us when we sailed across the Pacific in early 70's, just a Seiko watch, a sextant and a bit of book learning.
Been in data comm since we formed the bits individually with a Morse key.

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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#10 Post by Pontius Navigator » Tue Aug 21, 2018 8:59 pm

When I was a nav instructor I programmed a mini computer with out standard routes. I could do the flight and fuel plan in minutes. I could also input the student's data to check their workings. I could analyse flight plsn and trip in about 20-30 minutes for a quick debrief. I also had it programmed with a full astro suite. I could base my astro on the actual DR position rather than an assumed position 30 miles or more away.

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Re: Never go flying without an up to date chart!

#11 Post by Cacophonix » Thu Aug 23, 2018 1:26 pm

All this talk of navigation got me to re-reading Chapter 2 in the Tony Blackman/Anthony Wright book "V Force Boys" which is a slightly reworked transcript of a paper read at the Royal Institute of Navigation by Air Commodore Norman Bonner.

I was fascinaed to discover that at the height of the cold war the methods used for navigating the V Force had, in some ways, only moved on marginally from the techniques used during the Second World War but were aided by the mid 60's by true airspeed units, Green Satin Doppler Radar, Ground Position Indicators, Radar Altimeters and Ground Mapping Radars but still using periscope sited sextants and the often dodgy G4B gyro-magnetic compass.

The lecture is available via this link for those who would like to read it...

http://www.blackmanbooks.co.uk/navigation.html
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