If I want to create flight plan for a long flight, for instance transatlantic, in a historic aircraft without using any radio-based navigatonal aids, even less GPS, how can I do that?
The routes the built-in flight plan creator generates consist of great circle segments (where the heading is not constant). Sure, if you split an initial long (3000 nm or more) great circle route over the Atlantic into small enough segments then each segment can be approximated by flying a constant heading. But I would prefer to fly over the Atlantic using, say, three constant heading segments. In the style of “heading 280 for three hours at 150 knots, then 270 for two hours, then 260 for three hours”. Which would be horribly inprecise of course (wind, change in compass deviation over a segment), I would have to recognise where I am visually from landmarks once I reach the other side.
Any website that offers you the tools to do old fashion flight planning like this?
old school flight planning requires old school technology
you get a paper map, a compass and your wits. It’s VFR flying at it’s most primative.
Or you can use SkyVector (which real pilots use to plan and file).
To elaborate, i’m not sure there will be something automated in the vain of simbrief that lets you fly dead reckoning via automated route planning. So look at this as a chance to learn a new skill! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm7cMQTvLsQ
Those flights were also aided by celestial navigation, even during the day, even as late as the 1980’s. When I worked maintenance on KC-135A’s, I watched the boomer put a sextant through a port in the cockpit roof to get a bearing on a particular star near sunset. He told me it could also be done by taking a reading on the sun’s location.
For the sim, your best bet is to use a flat map (Mercator Projection) and find the bearing between your two points. Of course, that will translate into a curved path when transferred back to a globe, but you’ll only have one bearing to worry about for the flight.
What you’re after are called rhumb lines. You can probably pick some lat/lon positions and then find an online rhumb line calculator to give you the heading between waypoints. A good calculator will also give you the rhumb line distances so you can compare them with the great circle distances. I have a MathCAD spreadsheet (and an HP-48 program) that will calculate both, but none of those are any use to you.
One way to tell would be to pick two waypoints on the same latitude (so long as that latitude isn’t the equator or at the poles). The rhumb line between them will be due east or west while the great circle will be north or south of that (depending on whether your latitudes are in the northern or southern hemispheres).
Keep in mind his is an outdated method of flight planning. As soon as radio navigation came around, dead reckoning navigation became pretty irrelevant as the world built navaids and eventually sent up satellites to guide us around. Not to say people dont use it and there aren’t circumstances that call for it but great circle navigation is a much more efficient way to travel the globe (cause yknow…the earth is a sphere…). I believe i heard once dead reckoning is a last resort method of navigation should GPS and radio navigation both fail. It’s one step above using your ocular viewing orbs.
There are calculators to help you figure out how long it’ll take you traveling at a certain speed and map tools to measure distance and direction, but otherwise how it gets from A>B via C, D, E, F, G etc is up to you as they were up to the aviators of yore using this method.
It’s mathematically more efficient to use great circle navigation and since modern navaids (60s onward) are placed along the great circle, modern computers aren’t going to know you don’t mind the extra 20 miles 30 degrees off course or whatever because you want to see some particular monument, feature or whatever reason you have.
So as far as I can tell, looks like you’re gonna have to spend some time in front of a map, with a compass and a calculator on this one before you start flying
Yes, and I would use it (for realism) only when flying in outdated aircraft, of course;)
Sure, but if you read my post closely, I would want to use a sequence of rhumb line segments (i.e. constant course) to approximate a true (constantly changing heading) great circle course. For a North Atlantic crossing, for instance 200 nm segments.
I wouldn’t give much credit to most of that post… Aircraft do fly rhumb lines, even today, because it is practical to do so. (e.g. it’s easier to have the autopilot fly a constant heading for 200 miles than it is to have it fly a constant slight turn over that distance.)
It’s also very instructive to compare rhumb line distances and great circle distances. The difference isn’t as great as some people assume. And it explains why airplanes often DON’T actually fly the great circle but adjust for the winds and traffic instead. The minor difference in distance between an ideal great circle routing and a real life routing that accomodates wind and traffic also explains why routing via fixed tracks for ATC purposes or diverting 500 NM north of the great circle to avoid a headwind doesn’t add much time to a flight.
Do what you’re doing. It’s a good excercise in practical navigation.
Oh no i read your post. I was elaborating that you will not find a modern flight planning computer that will exclusively use dead reckoning because modern flight planning is based on efficiency and it’s more efficient to go up and over across greenland as opposed to heading straight across the ocean for example.
Completely understandable. What i would do is plan your legs manually and use a calculator to get the rhumb lines or whatever between those and write those legs out on a spreadsheet manually.
Bluntly put, there is no simbrief-like planner that does all the work for you in planning an entire multi-leg flight using exclusively dead reckoning. I think these people who have kindly replied to your thread were trying to be polite. You will have to put in some leg work (heh get it?)
