Navigation

Having a desired course is great but how do you know that you are on that course. Or even where you are at all- there are no roadsigns in the sky. Navigation, my dear Watson, is how we know where we are. In the most simple terms we would pick a compass direction that we wanted to go in, point the plane in that direction and fly until we got to wherever we were going. There is a magnetic compass that you can see just over the instrument panel and a gyroscopic compass in the instrument panel. Navigation tends to be not so simple. The big bugaboo is the wind. The wind can push us all over the sky, speed our travel over the ground or seriously slow us down. In my part of the world, the prevailing wind tends to blow from west to east. This is all very important because in an airplane time equals fuel burn and we must have somewhere to land and refuel before we run out. Running out of fuel while flying is stupid pilot trick #1 and I have made a personal commitment to avoid performing this affirmation of stupidity. There are plenty of other stupid things for me to do. So, in our flight west, how hard the wind blows in our face will ultimately determine our speed over the ground and that will determine how far we get each day. We will seek out the altitude with the most favorable winds to minimize this issue but small airplanes can only go so high and this will limit our ability to maximize the winds at altitude. And yes the wind blows at different speeds and directions up high. Back to navigation- sometimes the wind blows across the plane at on angle or another and actually causes the plane to drift off course yet the compass heading will remain unchanged. The compass just knows a direction- it doesn't care if we are on course or not. The first navigational upgrade to the compass is the chart, a map of the ground from the sky's point of view. Charts allow us to pick landmarks that confirm where we are. The problem with charts is that sometimes everything looks the same from the air. One town will look a whole lot like another, which river is that, that must be hiway 123 and so on. Sometimes there are no discernible features that stand out for hours of flying. So along came radio navigation, where we fly from one station to another along a course by following a signal and that works fairly well but has limits for distance and is basically line-of-sight- terrain can block the signal. Well, just like in your car and cell phone we have GPS in the plane. You can see two of them in the picture of the instrument panel of 374. The unit in the center of things is a certified navigation and communications device and the one to the right is a battery back up unit that also has sirrius radio and weather. I plug in our course and the GPS draws a pretty pink line from point A to point B and so on, keeping track of time, speed, our next way point, information about the next airport, altitude, and on and on. GPS is absolutely the cat's ass for navigation. The ultimate answer to how will we navigate the 1900 nautical miles from Ithaca,NY to Ione,WA is with it all- eyes out the window, chart on our laps, VOR tuned to the next station and the GPS programmed from A to B. I'm thinking we will get there.