I did my flight training between 1999 and 2002 in the Portuguese Air Force. At the time I used FS2000 and FS2002 to train for my IFR flights, I would fly the procedures and get to know the rates of descent, problematic spots, etc, but for my VFR navigations it was impossible to use. The proper physical points were simply not there.
Didn’t use MSFS for 20 years, then came back to FS2020 (bought a new computer for it, after seeing the YT videos of the game). I have been impressed by how “familiar” it feels at times when I fly in the Sim in areas where I usually fly (I fly medical emergency in helicopters, so lots of low level VFR flying). Sometimes my brain has a feeling of “this is the real world” which is very strange! I can only imagine what things will be like in another 20 years!
George was flying while I fumbled with the charts. BTW, if you don’t know George, you certainly should get to know him.
I took my private pilot check ride last summer. No digital was allowed, no gps. All my flight planning had to be done by hand on paper charts. I had to have my paper chart in cockpit and when he diverted me I had to find my new route by hand on that chart. Let me tell you it was awful. It was so hard to read and organize while flying a plane at 120 it’s in bumpy skies. That being said all my planning and navigation I do is digital. I keep a paper chart in the plane w me for an emergency. In the 1 year I have flown and owned my plane I have never used the ADF, or VOR for real world navigation. Only the GPS.
Hope your GPS never fails on you !
What GPS do you have in your plane & do you even have an ADF in it ?
At least you should be able to help maintain your VOR / ADF navigation skills with the sim, should you choose to.
Which leads to an interesting Chicken/Egg situation in Canada. In my area, if you’re GA IFR and your GPS goes out, ADF/VOR doesn’t do you much good because they decommissioned 90% of the NDBs and VORs in the area, basically if the GPS goes out you’re looking at radar vectors to a localizer or VMC as your only viable options.
I had a client who earned his type flying all RNAV approaches during the check ride. The FSDO ASO accepted an LPV approach as a precision approach. We only use EFBs at our Learning Center.
I don’t teach for the Private Pilot ACS, but IIRC pilotage and dead reckoning are still required tasks, and thus why the evaluator may have made the examinee demonstrate this using map and compass. I know there is a DPE who speaks at AOPA CFI summits who discusses that he is OK with using digital alternatives, but will require at least a demonstration of pilotage during part of his exam. He will allow the examinee to demonstrate it using an EFB.
I would double-check with the local FSDO/ASO on the requirement of paper on the private pilot check ride. If this DPE is making up his own check ride requirements then I recommend the CFI add his name to the list of the school’s blacklisted DPEs. Once you hit them in the wallet then they will tend to get with the program.
I’m sorry let me clarify, it’s not that I would never use a paper chart, vor or adf, it’s that in real life flying it’s not the best option. I do have an ADF on my plane I do not even power it on, most NDB,s in my area are broken. I only have two VOR,s in my area that are active most are getting shut down or not repaired. When I fly I use a Garmin 660 and I have backup iPhone and backup backup iPad. Now if the satellites go out I’m in trouble and switch to paper in my flight bag. However, I could be wrong but I don’t think there has ever been a total GPS satellite outage? Does anyone know?
You had a good instructor. Some people learned to fly as you describe, but at 250 KIAS (been there, done that, in the military, 20 years ago, all paper charts, in an aircraft that only had TACAN, flying M0.8 by hand, no autopilot). It’s a skill like any skill, if you don’t train, you lose it. As @N6722C said, use the sim to be minimally proficient, it’s what I do, because now everyone is flying all GPS/AP coupled approaches,and every 6 months I have to shoot an ILS in manual, single engine, unstabilized controls in the sim, I use MSFS to help train for that. It helps a lot. One day it may save your @ss, you never know…
Today there are five constellations of GNSS systems. GPS is just one of the constellations. Most modern systems are capable of tuning more than one system and many will tune SVs from multiple systems to get the best possible solution. With SBAS most receivers have the ability to track at least 24 satellites, although some of those will be the GEO SVs.
The chances that all five constellations will be unsuitable for navigation is highly unlikely. Your biggest threat to GNSS navigation is RF spectrum interference. Not all countries protect the GNSS frequency spectrum or will actively interfere with it. Warzones are a perfect example of when a country will actively interfere with GNSS. While GNSS is the easier signal to interfere with there have also been cases where countries that have actively spoofed VOR and NDB signals. The bottom line here is you have to be aware of where you are flying and what is going on below you.
Most advanced navigation systems use multisensor input to the navigation solution. These navigation systems are not pure GNSS solutions, just they use GNSS as one of the inputs and then compare the location provided with the other sensors usually through a Kalman filter. They will include dead reckoning through the ADC/AHRS, VOR-DME, DME-DME, and usually will have input from an IRU/INS. Most business aircraft and airlines will use these types of navigation systems. So even if GNSS is interfered with they can continue to provide a navigation solution. Although that solution may not meet approach criteria.
A part of any modern instrument courseware should be instruction on what to do if you ever get the dreaded integrity message or light on your avionics. If you have not received formal instruction on this then I would encourage you to contact your local CFII and plan some training. This is something that can easily be covered in an hour of ground time and followed up in an ATD for low-cost training. I know our Full Flight SImulators are capable of degraded SBAS and GNSS operations, but it is not part of the standard recurrent syllabus so the client must request it.
BTW, the current status of the U.S. GPS system can be checked here: GPS Constellation | Navigation Center and I cannot recall an instance where the entire system was down. With S/A turned off and 31 SVs in orbit the system is fairly healthy and unlikely to face an SV based outage.
The thing is though, when do you ever actually fly a NDB or even a VOR approach these days? The last time I flew a NDB approach in a real airplane was during my Instrument Rating checkride. That was in 2003.
My first Atlantic crossings were all done using HF communication, but now it’s primarily done using CPDLC. It’s just progress I guess.
NDBs have gone the way of the Dodo bird. There are only a handful left in the U.S. (along with the even rarer LOC BC) and I have a few bookmarked for clients who want their nonprecision approach to be an NDB or LOC BC. Our recurrent scenario uses KSNA runway 2L for the LOC BC and 9 out of 10 crews will choose the RNAV (GPS) approach over the LOC BC.
I haven’t kept up with GBAS (GLS) procedure futures since the equipment that I teach is not capable and there are only a handful of airports. Considering how expensive it is to install and maintain a Localizer and Glideslope equipment, I can see the cost savings with GBAS implementation. Just the airlines will fight it tooth and nail since the fleetwide upgrade to GLS equipment would be very expensive. They can also argue the same fuel savings and noise reduction benefits are available with RNAV to ILS procedures.
IMHO I can see one day in the future when ground-based navigation becomes almost nonexistent with SBAS and GBAS providing the lion’s share of navigation capability. Once the entire U.S. GPS constellation shifts to GPS 3 with its more interference-resistant signal and we get the ever-resistant General Aviation community to upgrade their fleet.
I’m sure you are right about the GA fleet dragging their heels, but these days pretty much everyone has WAAS capability allowing LPV approaches. That would be good enough in the vast majority of cases. The only concern I have is that total reliance on satellite based navigation is great until someone shuts it down.
I would recommend that you do some professional reading about GNSS, SBAS, and GBAS. No single individual or even a single country can shut down GNSS. It is like saying a single individual or single country could shut down the entire Internet. The best an evil actor could hope for is localized disruptions.
Not to be an alarmist, but if you are interested in this subject, you might like to check out.
During the Gulf war, GPS was jammed, and there was a rush to re-manufacture and deploy LORAN system .
Which raises the idea – for those trying to simulate Flight with earlier generation planes, in earlier years, what is currently missing now are Loran Receives in the planes and Loran station on the ground.
A 3PD Adding Loran Ground station to the sim , will probably never happen, but a FAKED simulated Loran Receive might be quite possible, at least as far as giving a correct lat-Long position on it’s display.
There are a lot of these doom-and-gloom scenarios running around. You have to view them through the lenses of strategic value and specific capabilities. These scenarios are designed by major think tanks to just throw a wrench in national capabilities studies and exercises. Think tanks mostly benefit from these discussions getting paid millions to study these scenarios.
GPS I was a weak signal and the closer you got to the ground the easier it is to jam. That is why the military still maintains a specific capability within GPS III.
LORAN was shut down in the 70s and 80s and mostly replaced with LORAN-C for aviation. LORAN-C was scheduled for termination, however, a study (thanks to a think tank) has pressed for an eLORAN capability. The eLORAN has been dropped as specifically named, however, the debate is still ongoing by lawmakers. Meanwhile, the FAA continues its plans to shut down specific VOR stations. https://www.faa.gov/ato/navigation-programs/vor-target-discontinuance-list
The reality is that there is no LRN system, other than IRU/INS, that is going to be immune to interference. With the right equipment on a mobile platform, a bad guy can just as easily jam or redirect a Localizer / Glideslope. Ground-based navigation is not immune to doom-and-gloom scenarios. There is just not a lot of money to study those scenarios.
This is exactly what was depicted in the movie “Die Hard 2”
Yippee Ki Yay, all over again!
and this is what Capt Kelsey, a RL Airline Pilot thought of the movie …
Let’s just say my wife has forbidden me from critiquing Hollywood representations of aviation operations.
I’m glad that someone is making a living out of it though. 
That’s impressive!
Although I do like having north up on the GPS. But if the airplane supports it, I like to have track up on the PFD inset map. That provides best of both.
Late response, but I used to do the same thing several others mentioned: fold the sectional (fairly unnaturally, I may add), and clip it to the knee board. We also had to do all of our course calculations in true headings, figure out the wind, then convert to magnetic (and correct for deviation). Doing this over a break in the map meant you had to flip and transpose the chart (or use two of the same chart). There was an art to all of it.
I kept all my old sectionals, IFR enroute charts, Airport/facility directories, terminal procedures charts, etc. It’s fun to see how airports and procedures have evolved over the years. One thing is for sure, there are a lot fewer NDBs out there and it’s getting that way for VORs as well.
The aircraft I flew as a student pilot had one CDI-only VOR gauge (no GS) and a standard six-pack with a manual-card DG. No GPS until well into instrument training and even then it was an old KLN 89B until the GNS came out a few years later. Still have the KLN 89B manual.
Today, I use ForeFlight on a GPS-enabled iPad mounted to the yoke and also have a G1000NXi in the plane and FF on my iPhone as a backup. Love the G1000 except I still prefer the old-style turn coordinators (hate how the G1000 does it). I still carry a paper chart just in case, but so many things would have to fail…
Still, I’ve led a bunch of sessions on my stream regarding how to plan and navigate using paper charts, and I do it frequently to keep my skills up. Plus, it’s absolutely fun.
I totally agree with you on this. I really dislike the G1000’s way of displaying this information. Sometimes digital is just not as effective as analog. The analog turn/slip is just so straightforward to interpret.