Old Dawg Learns New Tricks (Part 10 of 12)

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HON, WHY DON’T YOU JUST PULL OVER AND ASK DIRECTIONS???

 I’m pretty sure that phrase has been uttered a jillion times a day.  It may be ok when you’re on terra firma, but when you are at 3500 feet and the town you are currently  over, looks just like the last town you flew over five minutes ago , then you have a slight problem.

 Welcome back,  It’s time for yet another update on my quest to graduate my private pilot ground school course .

 Last night we dove into the world of navigation.  Life has been made incredibly simpler with the advent  of the GPS.  Many of us have them in our cars and even on our cel phones.  Most airliners have some form of them and many general aviation aircraft do too.  But since we are in school, we learned what how to navigate without using one of those cool toys.  The concepts have been around for ages.  VORs and NDBs.  Oh great here he goes spouting more acronyms,  Don’t worry I’ll define them, 

VOR is a VHF omnidirectional range.  Occasionally you’ll see them as you’re driving down the interstate.  They look like a little building with a bowling pin on top.  If you happen to be near I 55/70 and IL 162 in Troy Il, there’s one right behind the Cracker Barrel.     These stations help us pilots navigate the skies just like you do going to Cousin Earl’s house in Nebraska.   We learned how to tune our navigational radios to find them, track TO and FROM them and how to understand where we are in reference to them. 

 Another navigational aid we learned about is the NDB, the Non Directional Beacon  On a sectional chart (our name for a map) it looks like a circle with the measles, but this aid also acts as an Automatic Direction Finder that will help us figure out where the heck we are. In the example above, if I dialed 263 in my Automac Direction Finder I would know where I am in regards to the NDB CVM co-located at St Louis Regonal Airport  in Bethalto, IL.

 To  finish up the class,  we learned all about the Physiology of Flight.   What’s that Rik? The Physiology of Flight has to do with all those things that go on in our body that will cause us to believe we are climbing, descending or banking when the aircraft is in fact flying straight and level.    Many factors in our bodies play games with how we interpret how high above the runway we are or  how far away an aircraft is to our right or left.  Factors like stress, medicines, how macho we think we are  all play into how we interpret what’s going on.  We even discussed something as old as the family road trip the dreaded “Get-Home-Itis” that ALL dads are prone to.

Next up for myself and my fellow intrepid pilots-to-be is cross-country navigation.  So it will be a class of maps, plotters, flight computers and some swearing I’m sure.

Hope you have a great weekend.  The weather is sure going to cooperate (take it from me I learned all about weather last week).  Until next time I wish you safe flying and good tailwinds.

-Rik Out