mid-20th Century Navigation

[Typhoon1244]

I've finally become one of those spoiled young aviators you hear so much about. I was trying to tell my father about what happened to me yesterday as I was bringing my CRJ-200/G back to DFW from MGM...

...we were near Meridian at the time. There was a line of thunderstorms building ahead, and I reached down to FMS to see if "direct CQY" would take us around the storms. Right then, the whole FMS went kaput. My navigation display was blank and the flight director/autopilot reverted to heading mode.

I didn't have the foggiest notion where exactly we were.

We got ourselves focussed on the enroute charts pretty quickly and got ourselves set up on the Jet route we were supposed to be following between Meridian and Jackson. The FMS never came back, so we went back to doing things the Brasilia way, the old fashioned way, tuning and retuning the VOR's as we headed west, saying over and over to center "no, we can't go direct HOWDY." (We told ATC we were now a "/A" five times...they kept forgetting.)

Then it came time to fly the arrival: cross HOWDY at 280 knots, TACKE at 250 knots and 11,000 feet, etc, etc. Wow! Crossing radials? DME fixes? Descent planning...as in doing math in my head? Oh no!

...and my father is laughing his butt off...because he spent his whole career flying that way. And now here I was complaining about how hard it was. Needless to say, he didn't have much sympathy for my predicament.

That's my generation for you...we think "partial panel" means the flight director is inop.

 

[Whirlwind]

Ahh, don't feel too bad... I've found myself already spoiled by the avionics installed into modern 172s.

Last weekend I flew down to Austin from Dallas, 4.2 hours on the HOBBS round trip. To avoid the TFR over P-49 and around Waco, I entered a flight plan into the KLN-94 IFR GPS.

Flew down with the HSI slaved to the GPS and the autopilot turned on in Nav mode, probably touched the controls all of 10 minutes the whole flight.

If I lost the autopilot or KLN-94, I indeed would have felt "partial panel".

All this in a little 172SP.

Fly Safe!

 

[ILS8L]

Hard to tell war stories to old horses .

It is hard to get the desired effect when you try to tell war stories to old vets of the line .... "no s$#%t, there I was, 20 miles in trail with green needles, the lav was deferred and the FA was complaining that it was to cold in back but we managed to bring her home" .... having fun, living the dream.

 

[enigma]

I can sympathize. Spirits fleet still contains a few /A MD80s. Unfortunately, they happen to be the five tankers, which run LGA-
DTW-LAX and back. I usually check on with a request for a heading for direct, that works west of DesMoines, but the cleveland center controllers don't seem to be so helpful.

regards,
enigma

 

[Rick1128]

Love it. I can remember bringing single engine cessna back to new england for wichita. And they had no radios at all. All I had for company was a stack of sectionals and a few Mobil road maps. Oh and a few cases of Coors for my buds.