gahorn wrote:You miss my point...or I miss yours.
My point was that my compass is heavily influenced by land/taxi lights when they are on.... and thought others might wish to be reminded of that phenomenom.
(And a compass is relevant/useful regardless of time of day, IMO.)
It bothers me that so many "modern" pilots do not possess the stick/rudder/navigational skills of past generations because of automation dependency.
One of the fossils out at W88 and I were talking shop (mainly, I was listening), and we got on the topic of the recent restoration of his 1937 A-model Taylorcraft. Among the trials and tribulations of the aircraft's rebuild, he remarked that after he sold the airplane in the 1960s, someone hacked up the original instrument panel. Because of this, he scoured the US for a serviceable instrument panel that wasn't hacked to bits for a bunch of extra instruments, and finally found one that was from a later model airplane, but still represented a correct configuration for his airplane. He said when he bought the airplane back, it had two compasses...one in the panel (incorrect) and one on top of the panel (not factory standard). Before the restoration, he discarded the one in the panel, and during the restoration he left the one on top of the panel, even though the airplane didn't have a compass from the factory. That was the least invasive place to mount one.
He was telling me that it hadn't been long after he started flying that compasses were made standard equipment on airplanes, and he went on to detail some of the navigational errors that followed. Before, pilots were used to dead reckoning and using landmarks. When they got compasses, many of them didn't fully understand how they worked, magnetic deviation, wind drift, etc. and there were lots of pilots that had to put down because of fuel exhaustion because they were many, many miles off course. They simply flew a heading.
So in many ways, the children of the magenta line aren't that far removed from the old, old timers. I rather like using the GPS myself...but to feed into a CDI. I don't like flying screens, and I don't much care for the CDI sensitivity when flying TO a station. I always try to fly FROM stations. My first solo cross country didn't see me using the compass except to set my initial heading each way. All navigation was pilotage and I had very close checkpoints. I was probably 18 at the time, and surprisingly, I hated the GPS in the 170 (KLX135A) and the only reason I even turned the unit on was because it was a GPS/comm and I was using flight following.