During a previous life as an apprentice electrician I failed a practical exam for the then B-Grade electrical licence. The trade had moved on to plastic conduit, sheathed cable and modern switchboards with circuit breakers, but there I was racing the clock to construct a Masonite fuse board adorned with ceramic fuses, antiquated brass clips, and Bakelite switches that hadn’t been used for decades.
I guess there was still a use for all that somewhere, but surely we were better served by being tested on all modern hardware we were using every day.
It's important to gain an early appreciation of the limitations of devices like iPads within the constraints of a cockpit – how they heat up, reflect glare and can be a pain to manage if there’s nowhere convenient to mount them.
Aviation training is in a similar situation at the moment. Students are taught how to use maps and plotters when learning to navigate, but the syllabus doesn’t formally include GPS-based EFB (electronic flight bag) software they’ll inevitably use when flying in the real world.
Of course knowing how to manually calculate wind direction, airspeed and headings and using a chart to track your course is very important, and satisfying. But if students are going to use AvPlan or Oz Runways anyway, shouldn’t they be taught how to use them in flight?
Fortunately my instructors allowed for both. We’d have to plot headings manually, which would be checked prior to flight, and if we didn’t get lost we’d switch to our preferred EFB on the way home.
This was a good way to learn about using certain functions mid-flight. But perhaps more importantly it helped appreciate the limitations of devices like iPads within the constraints of a cockpit – how they heat up, reflect glare and can be a pain to manage if there’s nowhere convenient to mount them.
Keeping up those old skills
That said, I like the traditional way of flight planning as it makes me aware of the big-picture surroundings and forces me to write things down like alternate airfields and their CTAF, runway directions and elevation. If I had to divert in an emergency I’d rather have that information written down on my plan sheet, and hopefully memorised. It also lets me discover things along the route that could be a hazard, or might be worth getting down low and slow for a good look.
I also like calculating wind direction, airspeed and heading the old way with the E6B calculator. As well as being a pretty cool skill it gives me a clearer three dimensional picture of the wind conditions.
But, judging by the number of E6B calculators I see being sold on the Aviation Buy/Sell page on Facebook, it looks as though this is becoming a lost art. I guess most pilots are using their EFB to do all the calculations and directly transferring that information into charts as a backup (assuming they’re still using them).
That’s not a bad thing, EFB’s provide pinpoint accuracy when flight planning and I always use mine to check my own calculations. But I reckon if I started using it as my primary flight planning tool I’d eventually get into a habit of quickly plotting a course at the last minute without actually taking careful note of the surroundings beyond the magenta line.
My preference for the traditional ways isn’t as strong once in the air, where EFBs really come into their own. This is always a lively topic between pilots online. On one such discussion I saw a flying instructor claim there were no safety advantages to using an EFB in the cockpit instead of paper maps.
I doubt I’d be alone in begging to differ here.
EFBs allow us to spend way more time looking up and out the window to detect other traffic. We’re also far less likely to stray into restricted areas and controlled airspace, we can avoid storms before we even see them, and can instantly plot an emergency diversion to better deal with the situation at hand.
This is fantastic technology that reduces cockpit workload to make flying safer and for we recreational flyers even more enjoyable. But it works best when armed with knowledge and not just blindly following it.
What do you think – have paper charts gone the way of bakelite switches, or they still an important part of flight planning and navigation beyond being a backup?