Aviation Speak

In your cross-country training, you and your instructor may discuss the difference between tracking to a navigation aid or station and homing to it. Homing is the simpler but less efficient of the two. It simply means flying toward a navigational aid without correcting for wind. To stay on course, the pilot adjusts the aircraft heading as necessary to keep the aircraft traveling directly toward the station. With an ADF, this means always keeping the needle pointing to the top of the instrument's case - typically right at the nose of the airplane. Tracking, by contrast, involves selecting a heading that corrects for wind drift.

Negative Contact

The term negative contact is used by pilots in responding to traffic identified for them by air traffic control. For instance, if you are using flight following on a cross-country trip, you will likely hear the controller call out traffic for you from time to time. "Cessna Two-Whiskey-Yankee, traffic 10 o'clock, four miles, southbound, four-thousand, five-hundred." If you do not see the traffic that the controller has pointed out to you, you would reply, "Negative contact." You might follow the response with a request for help in avoiding the traffic. The same term can be used by pilots to inform air traffic controllers that they were unable to contact air traffic control on a specific frequency though the term "unable" is more common, as when a new frequency is assigned during a handoff.