Once upon a time, inexperienced pilots worried about getting lost. One highway, railroad track, or stretch of river can look pretty much like another. Lose track of your checkpoints or drift more than a few degrees off heading, and you could find yourself over unfamiliar territory with no airport in sight and no clear idea of where to find one. It could be getting dark, ceilings might be coming down, or fuel getting low. With a sectional and at least one VOR, you could always plot intersecting radials, but that’s a pretty high workload for a low-time pilot who’s growing a little nervous.
You might think the proliferation of GPS receivers in everything from instrument panels to cell phones had solved this particular problem. You would, alas, be wrong. Although a modern GPS can pinpoint your location within a foot or two, you still have to make sure it’s pointing you toward the right airport—or some airport, at least. Witness the 150-hour private pilot flying a solo cross-country during his commercial training: ATC terminated flight following when the field was “three nm straight ahead.” Visibility was only five miles in haze, so he “utilized the GPS to locate and align with the runway.” Unfortunately, what he took to be the 75-foot-wide runway was actually an 18-foot-wide suburban street a mile and a half farther east. But “until the airplane impacted mailboxes the pilot was certain he was at the airport”—at least according to the statement his instructor gave investigators.
Getting lost in the daytime can be scary, but at night it’s downright dangerous. You can’t count on seeing the hill that’s about to smack you in the face. Still, a few off-track pilots have the good luck to contribute comedy rather than tragedy to our collective storybook. Out west, for example, a Mooney’s descent to pattern altitude at 4,500 feet msl was interrupted by terra firma at 5,200 feet. Its pilot later admitted that “he was surprised when local law enforcement informed him that he was in Seligman, Arizona, instead of his intended destination of Boulder City, Nevada.” Instead of 61 nm west-northwest, he’d flown 52 nm almost due east. There’s no word on whether he had a GPS on board.
Related Articles
Once upon a time, inexperienced pilots worried about getting lost. One highway, railroad track, or stretch of river can look pretty much like another. Lose track of your checkpoints or drift more than a few degrees off heading, and you could find yourself over unfamiliar territory with no airport in sight and no clear idea of where to find one. It could be getting dark, ceilings might be coming down, or fuel getting low. With a sectional and at least one VOR, you could always plot intersecting radials, but that’s a pretty high workload for a low-time pilot who’s growing a little nervous.
You might think the proliferation of GPS receivers in everything from instrument panels to cell phones had solved this particular problem. You would, alas, be wrong. Although a modern GPS can pinpoint your location within a foot or two, you still have to make sure it’s pointing you toward the right airport—or some airport, at least. Witness the 150-hour private pilot flying a solo cross-country during his commercial training: ATC terminated flight following when the field was “three nm straight ahead.” Visibility was only five miles in haze, so he “utilized the GPS to locate and align with the runway.” Unfortunately, what he took to be the 75-foot-wide runway was actually an 18-foot-wide suburban street a mile and a half farther east. But “until the airplane impacted mailboxes the pilot was certain he was at the airport”—at least according to the statement his instructor gave investigators.
Getting lost in the daytime can be scary, but at night it’s downright dangerous. You can’t count on seeing the hill that’s about to smack you in the face. Still, a few off-track pilots have the good luck to contribute comedy rather than tragedy to our collective storybook. Out west, for example, a Mooney’s descent to pattern altitude at 4,500 feet msl was interrupted by terra firma at 5,200 feet. Its pilot later admitted that “he was surprised when local law enforcement informed him that he was in Seligman, Arizona, instead of his intended destination of Boulder City, Nevada.” Instead of 61 nm west-northwest, he’d flown 52 nm almost due east. There’s no word on whether he had a GPS on board.