NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Tom Sult
Date: 2017 Mar 02, 15:19 -0600
Tom Sult, MD
Frank,
Much better to look at the airspeed to see if it is decreasing or the altimeter to see if you are going up.
Pilots today rely too much on electronic gagets and not enough on basic, common sense. My last few years flying I noticed my first officers hardly ever looked out the window, even close to landing.
Several years back there was a dicussion on a flight across Africa where the navigator put the wrong info into the gyro compass. The airplane got way off course and crashed because of wrong heading and the nav shooting the wrong stars with the sextant. Once again, if the pilots would have looked out the window at a star or constalation they could have seen the gross error in their course. Look out the window - look at the sky! But first, look at the other instruments to see if they all say the same thing.
John H.
