Scudrunners

I am a dinosaur at heart. I was among the last to learn and hone my flight planning with a pen and counting on my fingers and I think that’s actually helped me. Back when I had a say in such things I required line pilots to cut their teeth on our flight planning with pen and paper as I believed that it would build a foundational understanding of that planning.

Now that I’m back at the bottom I see my policy hasn’t been upheld and it’s incredible the mistakes I see being made on the planning spreadsheets now in widespread use. Fun to get airborne and find the skipper pooched the weight and balance by 600 pounds or a charter gets turned down because “it can’t be done” when it really can, and quite easily.

Garbage in, garbage out I guess.

I liked flying across North America without knowing how to work the GPS thingy.

I'm not against them. I just enjoy the challenge of navigating via VNC, pencil, and watch, looking for landmarks.

Of course I am not being yelled at for messing up a schedule and have ended up staying in a place for longer than just over night a few times.

If I hit one of those real big lotteries I can invite you to fly around looking for good BBQ.

Coopers BBQ in Llano Texas is a good first start.

Damn and we used to do a 4 hours IMC flight based on a back bearing off and NDB and pull a "chinese" let down (ya I know not politically correct by today's standards - the name that is ) and hope you were in map reading range --

I have to say that the GPS likely had the biggest impact on arctic flying since getting heat to the flight deck