Getting from Point A to Point B

When you discover a better way to do something-and do it for long enough that the new way becomes second nature-it can be difficult to return to the old way. When that "something" happens to be a basic flying skill like navigation, finding out that you're rusty in the midst of an aircraft emergency can be more than just inconvenient-it can be disastrous.

So can being complacent. So can relying solely on modern cockpit advances like the global positioning system (GPS) to get you from point A to point B.

It's not something you think a lot about, but this fact was forcefully brought to mind after a series of mountain flying seminars I conducted recently in North Carolina.

One of the participants, a CFI, approached me after the last session. He asked, "Could you put that accident report back up-the one about the pilot who crashed flying IMC in the mountains without a flight plan? I think I knew him. He was a good pilot."

I put the accident report slide back on the video projector, and we discussed it. Our conversation concluded with, "What was he using to navigate? No flight plan of any kind was filed. The report said that 'Instrument meteorological conditions existed at the time of the accident.' The terrain was questionable. There were no reasonable navaids in that 'valley between two ridges of the Smoky Mountain Range' where he died."

Hindsight is always 20/20-especially when you're looking at accidents-but some lessons are there if we'll just look for them. Two of the most obvious to me are: Don't fly general aviation airplanes in the mountains in instrument meteorological conditions without filing and opening a flight plan, and always know where you are.

That accident was tragic, but what is really disturbing is that perhaps such situations might not be so unusual. Maybe a lot of them just don't result in fatal accidents, so we never hear about them.

No reasonable pilot would knowingly allow himself or herself to get into a position like that: in IMC, without a flight plan, in a valley between mountain ridgelines. Would they? Mishaps like this are just chalked up to "poor pilot judgment...no flight plan...inadvertent IMC."

Nobody knows-and maybe we never will know-why that crash happened. But the nagging question still remains, "How was he navigating?" What was his plan that day?

What's your plan?

That's a question you might want to think about. On a typical cross-country, how do you normally navigate from point A to point B-and what will you do if things don't go according to plan?

Although the federal aviation regulations don't require a flight plan to be filed for every flight, they do require that the pilot in command thoroughly prepare for each flight. Look at FAR 91.103. Navigation-getting from point A to point B-is an implicit part of that planning. The clear inference is that we must know where we intend to go and how we plan to get there, and evaluate the weather before takeoff.

Good preparation-including good flight planning-means having some idea of what you're going to do in the event equipment fails (including navigation equipment, both receivers aboard your aircraft and navaids on the ground), the winds are not as forecast or they change, or something doesn't go as planned. It also means knowing where you are all the time so you can avoid hitting the ground if things "go south" in the cockpit.

In the accident we mentioned previously, good preparation might have meant getting a good weather briefing before departure and filing an appropriate flight plan. It also might have meant planning the flight so that, even if equipment fails, the pilot would have had some idea of where he was and where a safe course might have been.

Look at the grids on your sectional chart. Picture the terrain you're going to overfly. You might even look at the MSA (minimum safe altitude) circle on the instrument approach procedure even when you're not flying under IFR. Both tell you what the safe altitude is if you lose your radio aids-but you still have to know where you are for that information to be valuable.

Situational and positional awareness is as simple as knowing where you are. And a good way to get a handle on that is to know where you're supposed to be to begin with.

The story of a mountain checkout

Although the beginning scenario of this article concerned an accident in the mountains, mountain flying has little to do with the points that we are discussing. Neither does the mountain checkout story I'm about to relate. But both of them have something to say about being able to navigate.

An established professional person and excellent pilot flew his modern, well-equipped airplane from the Midwest to Colorado to do a Rocky Mountain flying checkout with me. After several hours of ground school, we embarked on a local "see how your airplane performs here at 6,000 feet" flight (actually, the density altitude was 9,000 feet on that day). That was enlightening in itself. Then we began the preflight planning for our checkout flight in the Colorado Rockies.

The route we selected was from Colorado Springs over a pass up Highway 24 to a picturesque mountain town at about 9,500 feet, across a prominent ridgeline, westward to a large "flatland" reservoir, then toward a major mountain pass (which the student was supposed to discover ahead of time that we couldn't go through safely), and over yet another ridgeline to our first point of landing. That point was the highest airport in North America-Leadville, Colorado, elevation 9,927 feet msl.

From Leadville, we planned to stop at a couple of airfields down the Arkansas Valley for pattern work, then fly southwest in the lee of a 14,000-foot-plus ridge to another small mountain town at about 7,000 feet. From there we'd turn northeast, then across Royal Gorge where the river is a mile below the bridge spanning it, southeast to the Pueblo Reservoir, and back up Interstate 25 to Colorado Springs.

The entire trip was a little less than four hours at altitudes from approximately 6,000 to 14,000 feet msl. Few of our checkpoints were in the GPS database. A number of climb points had to be calculated. Basic navigation planning was definitely required.

This is easy when you've thought about the route ahead of time. The lesson here is that when you have to climb to safely traverse ridge lines, mountain passes, and other obvious obstacles-even at lower altitudes-you've got to understand both the performance capabilities of your airplane and where you need to begin each climb. And you still need to be able to navigate, especially if some of your cockpit gadgets fail.

The lesson of thinking ahead

The checkout highlighted another critical point: Regardless of your physical flying skills, if you never learned something well in the first place, subsequently have forgotten how to do it because of disuse (allowing navigational skills to deteriorate by exclusively using the GPS, for instance), or are facing a new situation where thinking ahead tells you that you need additional information or experience, you need to find yourself a CFI and get better prepared before you leap off into the unknown.

In this particular case, the thinking ahead that planning requires revealed that it had been so long since this pilot had been called on to plan a flight, he realized that he'd forgotten basic skills. Among them were the ability to draw a straight line on a chart, take into consideration irregular terrain, measure a course line, obtain forecast winds and temperatures aloft, apply winds to the intended course, compute a temperature-corrected true airspeed, measure coordinates from a map, insert coordinates (including climb points) into the GPS, and other similar planning and navigation actions.

If you find your skills set in this same condition, do something about it. Go back and brush up on the basics. You just might need them one day-soon! Practically speaking, it doesn't really make any difference whether you never learned it in the first place or just lost it from disuse over the years.

Whether you're a beginning navigation student in primary training or a modern GPS-only pilot with your own airplane, a good brush-up in basic VFR navigation-and regular practice-can pay off when confusion creeps into the cockpit. The objective is to know where you are at all times and to be able to remain safe, regardless of what happens to you in the cockpit. Survival might depend on knowing where you are.

The brief discussion with the flight instructor in North Carolina ended with the question, "I wonder how he was navigating to get into that mountain valley between those ridge lines?" It's a very good question.

How do you navigate?

Regardless of the method or methods you use, navigation starts with being able to fly prescribed headings, altitudes, and airspeeds. A small heading error of only 5 degrees will put you 10 miles off course after an hour's flying at 120 knots.

For those pilots who rely solely on the "Go to" feature of the GPS without any other detailed flight planning, the $64,000 question is: "What are you going to do when the GPS fails or you have to go someplace that isn't listed in its database?"

Questions like these can strike terror in the hearts of many modern pilots, because they've lost the ability to navigate without the GPS. Are you one of them?

It's important to remember that there really was navigation before GPS. Three basic kinds of navigation have been around for decades: pilotage, dead reckoning, and radio navigation. Overlay-don't replace-these with GPS, loran, and other modern technologies, and it really is hard to mess up if you have adequately planned your flight.

Some readers who swear by GPS could view this discussion as an attack upon one of the most beneficial technologies to come along in years. They will cite the receiver autonomous integrity monitoring of GPS as the equivalent of the old "Off" flag of VOR-something that warns us when there's a problem with the reliability of the equipment.

But good flight planning and reliable navigation are so important that we've got to make sure they're both covered on every flight.

To that end:

• Know what your alternative means of navigation will be if and when your primary method fails or its reliability comes into question
• Plan every flight. Have a back-up plan.
• Always leave yourself an out. Know what that out is and be willing and able to implement it.
• When it comes to your flying, don't believe in the Tooth Fairy; don't hope, wish, or guess.
• Rely on pilotage, dead reckoning, and established aids to navigation to get you where you want to go. Then back them up with whatever reliable labor-saving cockpit devices you can afford. Learn to use these proficiently when the pressure's on.

Kicking the tires and lighting the fires just won't cut it anymore from either a legal or common-sense standpoint. Because of that, we always need to be thinking about how we're going to get from point A to point B-before we fly, every time we fly.

Wally Miller is president of an aviation training, consulting, and marketing firm in Monument, Colorado. He is a Gold Seal CFI who has been instructing for more than 30 years and flying for more than 40.

Want to know more?

Links to additional information about navigation and flight planning are available on AOPA Online.