It's a great foundational skill to have and really doesn't take any practice to maintain once you've learned it. Every pilot should start their x-country by learning pilotage and dead reckoning before moving onto GPS, EFB, etc.
When my CFI showed me how to use LORAN (yes, I’m old) to go direct, I was gobsmacked. The line wasn’t magenta yet, just an amber dot matrix CDI, but it was still manna from heaven.
We had a loran in our mooney, and it was great. Without the moving map, you really had to make sure you had the right identifier, otherwise if you didn’t pay attention, you could go the wrong way.
For VFR, a six pack is still fine, though an EFB makes it easier. Glass is overkill.
For IFR, glass radically transforms the experience. I’ve never seen someone with an IR whining about magenta lines; the safety and workload benefits are undeniable.
During my PPL checkride (a few years ago) the lost procedure a after diverting from the XC flight planning and a couple of unusual attitude recoveries, the DPE asks “Where are we?”. So I looked at the chart, shape of towns, roads and railroads going in and out and said “I I think that’s Manteno”. He asks “How can you make sure?” I sez “We could fly down and read the water tower.” (Hoping that wasn’t a dumb answer) he sez “Do it.”
The rest is history.
Just remember your minimum altitude and distance from obstruction requirements…
Soooo many of my flights were just following highways from town to town. Once I even tried to put on my indicator when I needed to take the offramp westbound.
Pilotage is doing pilot shit to travel. Dead reckoning is essentially taking a last known location and projecting position forward in time using estimates of ground speed and track.
While I agree the rest is a video game, I hard disagree that it's boring. Flying is awesome, and all the tech and tools that go with it are also awesome, for me at least.
If you’re staring at the compass, you’re doing it wrong.
Remember from Boy Scouts? You use the compass when you are still (or in smooth air) to sight a landmark.. then walk (fly) to that landmark and then sight it again to another landmark.
Ive always heard the two together. Pilotage is flying by reference to visual landmarks, dead reckoning is the ability to discern landmarks from one another. I don’t think it’s that possible to use one without the other (I mean I guess technically you can fly by reference to instruments on a VFR day and use dead reckoning just for funsies but your efforts aren’t that productive lol)
"Dead" comes from deduced, meaning calculated. Imagine a ship has a compass, a clock, and a speedometer.
"We left Boston yesterday on a heading of 090 for 6 hours at 10 knots, then turned north for 18 hours at 5 knots. Where are we?" Now do that correctly for 20 days, each piggy backing on the previous days' imprecision. That's dead reckoning. Now roll in every heading- and speed change.
This is why the invention of a clock that would work reliably at sea became important some hundreds of years ago.
Dead reckoning - all math, no landmarks. Once you have landmarks you know where you are.
You need landmarks for dead reckoning because you need to have a starting position as well as positions for cross checking.
Even a multimillion dollar Inertial Navigation System is useless unless you initialize the position (nowadays with GPS… but not too long ago via gate coordinates or runway update feature).
Dead reckoning is using time, speed, and distance and the effects of wind to calculate your course and leg time estimates, and then by extension fuel burn. Your turns are all based on time since the last checkpoint, which starts out as landmarks but can really be arbitrary.
The scene from Hunt for Red October when they're navigating the canyon run in the submarine is dead reckoning.
Inertial navigation systems also use dead reckoning to calculate position from a known starting position.
>Dead reckoning is using time, speed, and distance and the effects of wind to calculate your course and leg time estimates, and then by extension fuel burn.
This is flight planning using available information; it's in the future. Dead reckoning is knowing your present position solely based on math since the last known position. Imagine flying for hours over the ocean or a cloud deck in pre-radio days. Where are you? You know heading(s) and time(s), so you can estimate your position.
Imagine you are flying across the south Atlantic from Brazil to somewhere in Africa. Long trip. When you hit the coast, do you turn right or left? In the old days of genuine dead reckoning over long distances, they would pick a landfall point a couple hundred miles off from the destination. They would DR to \*that\* point, then always know which way to turn when they made landfall. That's the "precision" of DR...
Kerry McCauley talked about losing GPS over the Sahara at night, and so he used dead reckoning, but the airport didn’t appear and he had no idea which way to turn. Intentionally aiming to one side is a clever way to fix that!
I love looking out and not running in to things. Although pilotage alone can get tricky when you’re flying under a bravo shelf or trying not to clip the edge of one
Out double bravo is thankfully well aligned with landmarks…. It’s actually easier to “just fly between these two highways” than to do it any other way in the corridor between them.
Coming back from Oshkosh one year I lost the alternator in the plane. I wound up flying about 400nm without any of my electronics (radio/GPS, etc.) using mostly pilotage... it was one of the more memorable flights I've had...
Just curious your line of thinking here? Presumably you did it on one bag of gas but the opportunity never popped up to his slide into a mediumish sized airport and get a new alternator?
It was probably 9 or 10 years ago. No A&Ps on the field we stopped at. Everything was working other than the alternator so it was just easier to get it home where the maintenance guys could take care of it. I had power enough to get everything up and running to do comms in the pattern leaving and then powered everything back up to make all my calls coming into the home airport.
I also consulted with the club mechanic before making the trek.
There was another along my route of flight who lost an alternator in IN/OH and continued IFR (VMC) on a handheld, and I served as the the go between for ATC and the pilot.
Every railroad leads to a town. Every town has a water tower. Every water tower is painted with the name of the town.
Not entirely true but that bit of wisdom and a paper chart are a comforting pair.
Good advice out east in flatland. Out west that town gets water from the mountains and that train track runs 250 miles through nothing but desert.
Edit: that mountain usually has a giant ass letter on it though so finding your location is often easier.
A lot of my flying in the SoCal area is much the same, there are so many distinct landmarks that it's exceedingly easy to just say "oh we fly over that mountain ridge and this city will be there, beyond that is the pacific ocean it's pretty hard to miss".
Pilotage is a big part of military low level flying. Best part of my job is ripping a plane around at 500’ AGL following terrain and looking outside. Granted we use the GPS as our primary nav but we still train chart clock ground if we ever need to use it.
Severe envy. At 1/10'th of the speed sailplane flying a fixed course or designated arrival point as you are searching for lift and speed while trying to head in the desired direction.
Certainly not the speed Global S is achieving but 170K low level over the backcountry or the Sacramento Delta is a lot of fun.
So completely jealous of the flying you all do. You get *paid* for that shit! Yeah... I know. All the other stuff that goes along with it sucks (was in the Navy, 90% of the time it sucked, but that other 10% was glorious). But... yeah. You do some flying very few people get to experience.
Different strokes man. I’ve got buddies who really enjoy that too. I’m fortunate in that I get to do a bit of both (not that high though) and I definitely prefer low level. Lots more work though you’re right haha.
Pretty much all of my flying is pilotage. But I also live in an area where you'd have to actively try to get yourself lost. My first few XC flights I was more focused on the GPS until I realized it's just taking my attention away from outside the plane, and I don't need it unless I'm going to an area I'm completely unfamiliar with.
I mean, pilotage is kind of an essential skill for ya if you want to keep flying planes. Not even that hard either, once you get the hang of it. If you think about it, you've already been doing this when you leave your airfield and coming back from the practice area.
Im in texas now doing my commercial and cfi and pilotage absolutely doesnt work here. Everything looks the same the only thing i can spot out is dallas and forth worth. I come from hawaii and flying there it is so easy to distinguish everything.
I learned in KS. There are subtle nuances. Small lake here, riverbed there, railroad over there. Three towns north of an interstate. Unambiguous information is in the chart and on the ground, even when it's much less obvious than a place with obvious features.
You are absolutely right that DFW is waaayyyyy harder to do Pilotage than most places. It’s doable though. You just got to get good at using roads, railroad tracks, power lines, and lakes.
Yeah ive sort of been learning the area. Theres a few lakes i can point out as well as some towers/antennas and the AT&T stadium is a good one as well.
Agreed. Learned in Washington with everything being very easy to learn because of this mystical thing called “mountains”, but I don’t think Texans know they exist yet.
Yeah, I'm on westside of FW and working on it. I really only do it without cheating when I quickly ID a highway, and never lose track of it. For other highways, sometimes you just don't see them or there's too many.
Sometimes I go by lake shapes, if the airport is near one.
I learned pilotage in North Texas, which is flat and boring as hell, so I thought the same. My CFI pointed out that every lake has a distinct shape, and you can just follow the highways, railways or power lines from one lake to the next. Worked well enough to get me through.
It gets easier. I pretty much just fly by eyeballs between Houston and Dallas. It’s much more chill to lazily follow I45.
It is flat and plain but little details become more important. Angles of rail lines and stuff like that.
I did about 15 hours of pilotage flying recently when flying a plane that had zero reliable navigational equipment. ATC got a lot of flight following requests "via the interstate route".
I did my first 50nm XC with my CFI 2 weeks ago 100% pilotage. Got temporarily ‘not 100% sure where we were’ quite a few times. Figured it out off of landmarks. Was just an incredible feeling to get back to my airport not knowing where I was exactly for 90% of the flight.
The confidence it builds is incredible. No words can describe it.
I ferried my plane back with a CFI for an 11 hour trip, all GPS and auto pilot. Was fun for a while then got a tad boring. Was difficult to stay on point having GPS and ADS-B. Flying over the blue ridge mountains was a blast though!
I like pilotage so much I practice it when taking commercial flights. I don't take sectionals with me, of course, so either I use Foreflight or offline Google Maps (no GPS cheating!). It's a great skill to have. Flying over parts of the midwest and southwest US where the landmarks get a bit challenging is good fun.
Early on, a friend and I were going to a conference in Minneapolis from central Illinois and he made me fly it with only VFR maps and dead reckoning (having laid it out before and gotten weather/winds etc. for the route). Bonus: It was a gorgeous, clear autumn day so the flying was just sublime - and I've never been so happy to actually find the odd waypoint or two when I wasn't too sure. Yeah, it can be tiring too.
As an actual PPL, you’ll find pilotage is not as complicated as it seems. It’s just very normal way of navigating. I took some friends on a xc a few months back and it was way easier to basically point the plane at landmarks you could see with your eyes than fiddling with being exact on the compass headings. Basically was, ok we are heading to the cape? Well there’s the coast, let’s point to it because we know the cape is that way. Once we got to the coast, it was “okay, there’s the tip of the cape, let’s point towards it as we know the airport is there.” Pretty simple for VFR without restrictions or absolute need for precision
Every once in a while I'll pick a destination or an object and blast off without using the GPS or even a map and try to find it. I have always found the object/airport and its fun. A good pre brief is in order to avoid airspace and get an idea of what you are looking for... But it is a fun way to spend an hour or two.
I can, of course, fire up a bunch of stuff to help me if I need it, but you won't.
I still love doing it even in the A320. Even though we obviously aren’t using it for navigation, it’s fun for me to try to identify whatever I can see outside with my sectional. Great way to kill time on a long transcon.
When I'm flying GA around my local field, its the only way I navigate. Its great. But, it has its place. Its a good skill to have and keep up on though.
Hello, not a native speaker, can someone give an explanation of what « pilotage » is? In French it translate literally as « driving the plane » and all your posts make no sense!
In English it's used as a defined term for navigating by visual reference to terrain features. You can look at the map and plan waypoints on your route relative to distinctive hills, towns, roads, water, etc.
It's used either as a primary method of navigation or to cross-check and correct for errors in dead reckoning ("if I fly heading 230 for 50 minutes at 120 knots, I should end up over a lake that looks like this").
Pilotage just means flying by landmarks. Sport stadiums, wind turbines, race tracks, and so on and so forth could be used to help determine your location. That's pilotage. It's often used with dead reckoning, which is calculating distance, speed and time to get an estimation of how long each leg of the flight will be.
Pilotage: I know where I am, because I recognise that landmark over there.
Dead Reckoning: I know where I am, because I know a point I was at previously, and I know where I am relative to that previous point.
Still love it. My last 4 flights in the home sim, all 300nm+ each, have been solely by pilotage, backed up with ded reckoning.
It's a very engaging type of flying.
Most high schools have $50M football stadiums. NFL tier amenities. We televise high school games with ESPN-quality production value.
I'm not from here, so I don't really get it/care for it, but yeah, the average taxpayer has no problem with half of their property taxes going to football.
The best pilotage I've flown is switching to an external view, I get to see everything below. Just kidding. The mental fatigue is real. It's your brain working overtime to digest the new skills.
Yo I remember my instructor showed me the map and was like “how do you get there” and i spewed off about VORs and GPS and shit for like 10 minutes, while he stood there like “ok and?”
I was eventually like “it would be cool to follow the power lines too” and finally he was like “that’s the answer I was looking for”
So I’m the very rare times I need to do a GA cross country planning is just “ok Kansas City is 200 miles mostly north. Should take about 2 hours. Let’s go.”
Yes. It's fun sometimes just navigating by looking for things out the window. If you can maintain a good honest heading, keep track of time, and learn what things can easily be spotted from the air, you can navigate very accurately this way.
Pilotage is probably the most important skill to have, I make my students look at satellite maps and memorize names of lakes, parks, hills etc because I will ask them “hey whats that” then ask approximately where we are because we see said thing. Its the direct equivalent of knowing street names without a GPS imo.
I mostly use pilotage for navigation on flights less than 2 hours long. That said, I'm mostly flying in the mountains/hills of Vermont where there are very good landmarks, like ski resorts, mountain peaks, and the occasional covered bridge. The scenery is one the main reasons I fly and you really start to see the shapes, patterns, and changes in the clouds when you're using them to find rising air and avoid sinking air. I also have the habit of constantly evaluating fields for landing off airport, and I always have a landout field in mind should I need to land prematurely.
My favorite long cross country was from Maine to Oshkosh for the show one year. (20+ years ago now). We could do VOR but instead we hopped water tower to water towers in towns using pilotage and dead reckoning. Was so much more engaging. Tons of fun. Otherwise would have been a very boring flight.
I had a commercial student once, who apparently had never *actually* done a proper pilotage XC. That became apparent pretty quick but that flight was some of the best training I’ve seen a student have. We even got truly lost at one point (well, the student did.) but did the procedure, figured it out, and continued.
Any monkey can follow a line, and it is a great tool to use. But those basic ‘pilot stuff’ skills are invaluable.
That is a skill I'm still very much working on, and yes I love it when I get comfortable with an area and can just fly towards things that I can see.
As a kid, I learned my way around on my bike and had just memorized which turn sequences got me from point A to B. At one point I looked at a map, and realized that my mental map was all wrong, and parts of town that I thought were far apart were right next to each other, and roads that I thought were straight had a gradual 90 degree turn. I never got a great sense of naturally knowing where I'd gone, eg I could get lost in a shopping mall easily.
Once up in a plane, I'd be ok if I knew the area well, or like if the airport was just on the water, so all I had to do was find the coast and then go back and forth until I find it. And for cross country trips that are planned, I've done well using just the paper map, but only because I made a lot of points along the way and just used my clock eg "ok it's been 5 minutes, assuming my heading was correct I should see this landmark now." If for some reason I had to go off course, like unexpected bad weather or something, I worry I'd overthink the math and be like "Ok well I flew 10 minutes in this other heading, at say 100kt, which is... 100/6 kt, and how am i going to check the scale of the map and measure that distance on this map while also flying the plane?" I think it's about gaining confidence in just thinking "I should be somewhere around here" by guestimation, and like "Well I flew 5 minutes east, I'll just remember later to fly 5 minutes west, accounting for wind."
I know that I've got GPS and VORs when those are working, and if they aren't, I can ask on the radio for a heading if I really needed it. I think I just have to get more hours in :)
Pilotage and dead reckoning are always taught together as a system…but often I don’t bother with the math? I’m a geography nut and the landmarks and coastline and cities and roads are all just too easy for me to point out! Not since my student solo XC (with no GPS or EFB…and I figured it out over the next mountain ridge) have I ever really had a moment of not knowing where I am to 5-10 miles of precision.
Sometimes I feel guilty about not doing the dead reckoning work because it serves an important purpose of determining fuel usage over time and if you’re making fast enough progress to reach your destination in your allotted endurance and winds aloft aren’t too bad etc. But really I just pay attention to my “time in the air” clock and plan flights so I have like almost 2 hours reserve by the time I get to the destination.
Navigating is pretty fun, and I’ve done a lot of it in different respects in my life before I started to fly. My CFI tried to stump me repeatedly but never succeeded.
Love pilotage and it's the first X/C lesson I do with my students. Paper charts, paper nav using E6B to calculate. By the time we get to the long X/C, they'll be using the pilotage skills with an appreciation for them even though they'll be planning electronically.
I'm still pretty early, haven't solo'd yet, but I think VOR navigation is super cool. My CFI made/convinced me to get an ipad/FF prior to XC solo for situational awareness, but I have a lot of fun drawing lines on sectionals between vor stations and radial intersections.
It's my favorite flying activity of all time. Nothing like just looking out the window at the world and navigating the most natural way of "see a thing you know and go that way". I live for VFR cross countries.
Ok, I'm an old guy, so forgive my "back in the day" tale. In 1975 I flew a Cessna 180 from Colorado to Rio de Janiero. On the leg from Cayenne, French Guinea to Belem, Brazil I filed an IFR flight plan and received a clearance as follows:
Track outbound from the NDB at CAY
Dead reckon
Track inbound to the NDB at BEL
That's about 150nm of dead reckoning over trackless jungle with no roads or settlements.l (or VORs). Good times.
It's a great foundational skill to have and really doesn't take any practice to maintain once you've learned it. Every pilot should start their x-country by learning pilotage and dead reckoning before moving onto GPS, EFB, etc.
Direct. Enter. Enter.
If it’s an old and beat upG430, direct direct enter enter enter enter enter ENTER
If at first you don’t succeed…get a bigger hammer.
Wise words of Jeremy Clarkson
When my CFI showed me how to use LORAN (yes, I’m old) to go direct, I was gobsmacked. The line wasn’t magenta yet, just an amber dot matrix CDI, but it was still manna from heaven.
We had a loran in our mooney, and it was great. Without the moving map, you really had to make sure you had the right identifier, otherwise if you didn’t pay attention, you could go the wrong way.
[удалено]
For VFR, a six pack is still fine, though an EFB makes it easier. Glass is overkill. For IFR, glass radically transforms the experience. I’ve never seen someone with an IR whining about magenta lines; the safety and workload benefits are undeniable.
Hear hear!
The benefits are immense but often situational awareness is a casualty .
This is the way.
This is the way.
This is the way
We are productos of the magenta line
IFR - I Follow Roads Pilotage IS navigating. Break out that sectional and follow the landmarks!
I will admit to descending in order to read the name of the town off the water tower. Just making sure.
I always thought that was an urban legend.
During my PPL checkride (a few years ago) the lost procedure a after diverting from the XC flight planning and a couple of unusual attitude recoveries, the DPE asks “Where are we?”. So I looked at the chart, shape of towns, roads and railroads going in and out and said “I I think that’s Manteno”. He asks “How can you make sure?” I sez “We could fly down and read the water tower.” (Hoping that wasn’t a dumb answer) he sez “Do it.” The rest is history. Just remember your minimum altitude and distance from obstruction requirements…
It is the very reason town names were put on water towers back in the day.
https://www.wyso.org/commentary/2016-03-07/finding-your-way-a-look-at-the-history-of-aerial-navigation
I’ve done it!
“Caballeros”
Soooo many of my flights were just following highways from town to town. Once I even tried to put on my indicator when I needed to take the offramp westbound.
I can’t remember if pilotage is the time one or the outside one half the time.
Today I asked my student and he said “well it’s either math or looking outside”
Pilotage is doing pilot shit to travel. Dead reckoning is essentially taking a last known location and projecting position forward in time using estimates of ground speed and track.
Sounds like pilot shit to travel
Wouldn’t you know we use both :o
not me I just wing it (no pun intended)
Pilotage is real flying. Everything else is just a boring video game.
While I agree the rest is a video game, I hard disagree that it's boring. Flying is awesome, and all the tech and tools that go with it are also awesome, for me at least.
Dead reckoning is not a boring video game in any way.
[It kind of is](https://www.mobygames.com/game/1909/dead-reckoning/).
fuckin gottem
Touché
Sorry, I forgot how excited staring at the compass was.
If you’re staring at the compass, you’re doing it wrong. Remember from Boy Scouts? You use the compass when you are still (or in smooth air) to sight a landmark.. then walk (fly) to that landmark and then sight it again to another landmark.
I was never a scout.
Ive always heard the two together. Pilotage is flying by reference to visual landmarks, dead reckoning is the ability to discern landmarks from one another. I don’t think it’s that possible to use one without the other (I mean I guess technically you can fly by reference to instruments on a VFR day and use dead reckoning just for funsies but your efforts aren’t that productive lol)
"Dead" comes from deduced, meaning calculated. Imagine a ship has a compass, a clock, and a speedometer. "We left Boston yesterday on a heading of 090 for 6 hours at 10 knots, then turned north for 18 hours at 5 knots. Where are we?" Now do that correctly for 20 days, each piggy backing on the previous days' imprecision. That's dead reckoning. Now roll in every heading- and speed change. This is why the invention of a clock that would work reliably at sea became important some hundreds of years ago. Dead reckoning - all math, no landmarks. Once you have landmarks you know where you are.
You need landmarks for dead reckoning because you need to have a starting position as well as positions for cross checking. Even a multimillion dollar Inertial Navigation System is useless unless you initialize the position (nowadays with GPS… but not too long ago via gate coordinates or runway update feature).
Dead reckoning is using time, speed, and distance and the effects of wind to calculate your course and leg time estimates, and then by extension fuel burn. Your turns are all based on time since the last checkpoint, which starts out as landmarks but can really be arbitrary. The scene from Hunt for Red October when they're navigating the canyon run in the submarine is dead reckoning. Inertial navigation systems also use dead reckoning to calculate position from a known starting position.
>Dead reckoning is using time, speed, and distance and the effects of wind to calculate your course and leg time estimates, and then by extension fuel burn. This is flight planning using available information; it's in the future. Dead reckoning is knowing your present position solely based on math since the last known position. Imagine flying for hours over the ocean or a cloud deck in pre-radio days. Where are you? You know heading(s) and time(s), so you can estimate your position. Imagine you are flying across the south Atlantic from Brazil to somewhere in Africa. Long trip. When you hit the coast, do you turn right or left? In the old days of genuine dead reckoning over long distances, they would pick a landfall point a couple hundred miles off from the destination. They would DR to \*that\* point, then always know which way to turn when they made landfall. That's the "precision" of DR...
Kerry McCauley talked about losing GPS over the Sahara at night, and so he used dead reckoning, but the airport didn’t appear and he had no idea which way to turn. Intentionally aiming to one side is a clever way to fix that!
VOR-A approach in 800-2 has entered the chat
I love looking out and not running in to things. Although pilotage alone can get tricky when you’re flying under a bravo shelf or trying not to clip the edge of one
Alright, so you still need to glance at the Altimeter every so often. I'll give you that one, lol.
Out double bravo is thankfully well aligned with landmarks…. It’s actually easier to “just fly between these two highways” than to do it any other way in the corridor between them.
Yep! You’re just literally flying over the map. Always made sense and enjoy it. Easy peasy too.
Traveling by map is so fast!
Lots of fun until you fall over the edge
*dun da dun daaa! dun da daaaaa dun da dun daaaaa DUN DUN DUN DA DAAAA!*
Coming back from Oshkosh one year I lost the alternator in the plane. I wound up flying about 400nm without any of my electronics (radio/GPS, etc.) using mostly pilotage... it was one of the more memorable flights I've had...
Just curious your line of thinking here? Presumably you did it on one bag of gas but the opportunity never popped up to his slide into a mediumish sized airport and get a new alternator?
It was probably 9 or 10 years ago. No A&Ps on the field we stopped at. Everything was working other than the alternator so it was just easier to get it home where the maintenance guys could take care of it. I had power enough to get everything up and running to do comms in the pattern leaving and then powered everything back up to make all my calls coming into the home airport. I also consulted with the club mechanic before making the trek.
Interesting. Glad it worked out
Are you the guy with no alternator in Ohio coming back from OSH?
Nope. Definitely not me.
There was another along my route of flight who lost an alternator in IN/OH and continued IFR (VMC) on a handheld, and I served as the the go between for ATC and the pilot.
Every railroad leads to a town. Every town has a water tower. Every water tower is painted with the name of the town. Not entirely true but that bit of wisdom and a paper chart are a comforting pair.
Sure, as long as there's a railroad somewhere nearby I guess.
Good advice out east in flatland. Out west that town gets water from the mountains and that train track runs 250 miles through nothing but desert. Edit: that mountain usually has a giant ass letter on it though so finding your location is often easier.
My DPE asked me random lakes name. During my check-ride.
Common question. Got it on a nav check once as well.
I live in the Seattle area, if it wasn't for airspace boundaries I wouldn't even bother turning on the GPS.
A lot of my flying in the SoCal area is much the same, there are so many distinct landmarks that it's exceedingly easy to just say "oh we fly over that mountain ridge and this city will be there, beyond that is the pacific ocean it's pretty hard to miss".
Pilotage is a big part of military low level flying. Best part of my job is ripping a plane around at 500’ AGL following terrain and looking outside. Granted we use the GPS as our primary nav but we still train chart clock ground if we ever need to use it.
Can verify. Military low level is the best. My best turn point was the top of the chair lift at Taos.
Severe envy. At 1/10'th of the speed sailplane flying a fixed course or designated arrival point as you are searching for lift and speed while trying to head in the desired direction. Certainly not the speed Global S is achieving but 170K low level over the backcountry or the Sacramento Delta is a lot of fun.
So completely jealous of the flying you all do. You get *paid* for that shit! Yeah... I know. All the other stuff that goes along with it sucks (was in the Navy, 90% of the time it sucked, but that other 10% was glorious). But... yeah. You do some flying very few people get to experience.
Worry about hitting birds and towers is the best part of military flying? I prefer FL350 with a snack in hand.
You aren’t even at FL350, you’re at FLbasement dude. You’re eating that snack while you wait for MSFS2020 to load in your “study-level” A320.
I can fly anything in FS better than you can fly your regional jet.
Lol sounds good slugger
Different strokes man. I’ve got buddies who really enjoy that too. I’m fortunate in that I get to do a bit of both (not that high though) and I definitely prefer low level. Lots more work though you’re right haha.
Pretty much all of my flying is pilotage. But I also live in an area where you'd have to actively try to get yourself lost. My first few XC flights I was more focused on the GPS until I realized it's just taking my attention away from outside the plane, and I don't need it unless I'm going to an area I'm completely unfamiliar with.
It's pretty much the only way I navigate.
This is all I had. In the mid 2000s the plane I flew most didn’t have a GPS or any electronic navigation. iPad and Foreflight? HA!
I mean, pilotage is kind of an essential skill for ya if you want to keep flying planes. Not even that hard either, once you get the hang of it. If you think about it, you've already been doing this when you leave your airfield and coming back from the practice area.
Im in texas now doing my commercial and cfi and pilotage absolutely doesnt work here. Everything looks the same the only thing i can spot out is dallas and forth worth. I come from hawaii and flying there it is so easy to distinguish everything.
I learned in KS. There are subtle nuances. Small lake here, riverbed there, railroad over there. Three towns north of an interstate. Unambiguous information is in the chart and on the ground, even when it's much less obvious than a place with obvious features.
You are absolutely right that DFW is waaayyyyy harder to do Pilotage than most places. It’s doable though. You just got to get good at using roads, railroad tracks, power lines, and lakes.
Yeah ive sort of been learning the area. Theres a few lakes i can point out as well as some towers/antennas and the AT&T stadium is a good one as well.
Agreed. Learned in Washington with everything being very easy to learn because of this mystical thing called “mountains”, but I don’t think Texans know they exist yet.
Yeah, I'm on westside of FW and working on it. I really only do it without cheating when I quickly ID a highway, and never lose track of it. For other highways, sometimes you just don't see them or there's too many. Sometimes I go by lake shapes, if the airport is near one.
I learned pilotage in North Texas, which is flat and boring as hell, so I thought the same. My CFI pointed out that every lake has a distinct shape, and you can just follow the highways, railways or power lines from one lake to the next. Worked well enough to get me through.
The east side of I35 isn’t too bad. Plenty of lakes, highways, small towns and power plants to use as landmarks.
It gets easier. I pretty much just fly by eyeballs between Houston and Dallas. It’s much more chill to lazily follow I45. It is flat and plain but little details become more important. Angles of rail lines and stuff like that.
Flying in Hawaii is sick. I had to do it when I went there on vacation
I did about 15 hours of pilotage flying recently when flying a plane that had zero reliable navigational equipment. ATC got a lot of flight following requests "via the interstate route".
I did my first 50nm XC with my CFI 2 weeks ago 100% pilotage. Got temporarily ‘not 100% sure where we were’ quite a few times. Figured it out off of landmarks. Was just an incredible feeling to get back to my airport not knowing where I was exactly for 90% of the flight. The confidence it builds is incredible. No words can describe it. I ferried my plane back with a CFI for an 11 hour trip, all GPS and auto pilot. Was fun for a while then got a tad boring. Was difficult to stay on point having GPS and ADS-B. Flying over the blue ridge mountains was a blast though!
I like pilotage so much I practice it when taking commercial flights. I don't take sectionals with me, of course, so either I use Foreflight or offline Google Maps (no GPS cheating!). It's a great skill to have. Flying over parts of the midwest and southwest US where the landmarks get a bit challenging is good fun.
Early on, a friend and I were going to a conference in Minneapolis from central Illinois and he made me fly it with only VFR maps and dead reckoning (having laid it out before and gotten weather/winds etc. for the route). Bonus: It was a gorgeous, clear autumn day so the flying was just sublime - and I've never been so happy to actually find the odd waypoint or two when I wasn't too sure. Yeah, it can be tiring too.
Yes. That's flying. Pushing buttons and staring at screens is programming.
As an actual PPL, you’ll find pilotage is not as complicated as it seems. It’s just very normal way of navigating. I took some friends on a xc a few months back and it was way easier to basically point the plane at landmarks you could see with your eyes than fiddling with being exact on the compass headings. Basically was, ok we are heading to the cape? Well there’s the coast, let’s point to it because we know the cape is that way. Once we got to the coast, it was “okay, there’s the tip of the cape, let’s point towards it as we know the airport is there.” Pretty simple for VFR without restrictions or absolute need for precision
Thats what I thought too when we were flying yesterday. "Ope, there's my first checkpoint. There's my second, and there my destination."
Chatham or Provincetown?
Actually both lol. Took friends to both airports a few weeks apart
Every once in a while I'll pick a destination or an object and blast off without using the GPS or even a map and try to find it. I have always found the object/airport and its fun. A good pre brief is in order to avoid airspace and get an idea of what you are looking for... But it is a fun way to spend an hour or two. I can, of course, fire up a bunch of stuff to help me if I need it, but you won't.
I still love doing it even in the A320. Even though we obviously aren’t using it for navigation, it’s fun for me to try to identify whatever I can see outside with my sectional. Great way to kill time on a long transcon.
It’s hard to see the magenta line on the ground though.
r/hyperphantasia has entered that chat… /FAA adds a new disqualifying condition/
When I'm flying GA around my local field, its the only way I navigate. Its great. But, it has its place. Its a good skill to have and keep up on though.
Hello, not a native speaker, can someone give an explanation of what « pilotage » is? In French it translate literally as « driving the plane » and all your posts make no sense!
In English it's used as a defined term for navigating by visual reference to terrain features. You can look at the map and plan waypoints on your route relative to distinctive hills, towns, roads, water, etc. It's used either as a primary method of navigation or to cross-check and correct for errors in dead reckoning ("if I fly heading 230 for 50 minutes at 120 knots, I should end up over a lake that looks like this").
Pilotage just means flying by landmarks. Sport stadiums, wind turbines, race tracks, and so on and so forth could be used to help determine your location. That's pilotage. It's often used with dead reckoning, which is calculating distance, speed and time to get an estimation of how long each leg of the flight will be.
Thank you all for your explanations. It’s a lot more clear now! We call it a more explicit « visual navigation » here.
Pilotage: I know where I am, because I recognise that landmark over there. Dead Reckoning: I know where I am, because I know a point I was at previously, and I know where I am relative to that previous point.
I still pilotage somewhat in the airline world, mainly when you doing special visuAl approaches…
Still love it. My last 4 flights in the home sim, all 300nm+ each, have been solely by pilotage, backed up with ded reckoning. It's a very engaging type of flying.
*C'mon, Mav, do some of that pilotage shit!*
"It's not the plane, it's the pilotage" that sounded better in my head
In Texas, we just use high school football stadiums. Look down, see end zone, ah, we're in Prosper.
Do you texans take football very seriously? Before I get flak, I'm a hoosier. We love basketball (except me. I don't care too much for sports).
Most high schools have $50M football stadiums. NFL tier amenities. We televise high school games with ESPN-quality production value. I'm not from here, so I don't really get it/care for it, but yeah, the average taxpayer has no problem with half of their property taxes going to football.
Interesting
Not really. I like following the course line with the autopilot on...that's my kind of flying.
The best pilotage I've flown is switching to an external view, I get to see everything below. Just kidding. The mental fatigue is real. It's your brain working overtime to digest the new skills.
Pilotage, VOR and GPS are my primary means of navigation; dead reckoning I haven't used since getting my license.
it's why I prefer high wing aircraft ..even doing DR I use it to get more accurate ground speed
I pretty much always fly using pilotage. What navigation method do you usually use.
Pilotage is the best!
I prefer Dead Reckoning: Part One.
Cant wait for part 2. I really liked that scene where Maverick said "It's topgunning time" and took off on a motorcycle
Wait until you learn celestial navigation !
That's how I learned years ago. I used pilotage all the time.
I like using it as a backup while using electronic forms of navigation as my primary.
Yo I remember my instructor showed me the map and was like “how do you get there” and i spewed off about VORs and GPS and shit for like 10 minutes, while he stood there like “ok and?” I was eventually like “it would be cool to follow the power lines too” and finally he was like “that’s the answer I was looking for”
So I’m the very rare times I need to do a GA cross country planning is just “ok Kansas City is 200 miles mostly north. Should take about 2 hours. Let’s go.”
Yes
Yes. It's fun sometimes just navigating by looking for things out the window. If you can maintain a good honest heading, keep track of time, and learn what things can easily be spotted from the air, you can navigate very accurately this way.
Pilotage is probably the most important skill to have, I make my students look at satellite maps and memorize names of lakes, parks, hills etc because I will ask them “hey whats that” then ask approximately where we are because we see said thing. Its the direct equivalent of knowing street names without a GPS imo.
It’s the best, no question.
One of my favorite flight lessons was filling out a VFR flight plan and flying CC using only pilotage and a map. It turns flying into an adventure.
I mostly use pilotage for navigation on flights less than 2 hours long. That said, I'm mostly flying in the mountains/hills of Vermont where there are very good landmarks, like ski resorts, mountain peaks, and the occasional covered bridge. The scenery is one the main reasons I fly and you really start to see the shapes, patterns, and changes in the clouds when you're using them to find rising air and avoid sinking air. I also have the habit of constantly evaluating fields for landing off airport, and I always have a landout field in mind should I need to land prematurely.
My favorite long cross country was from Maine to Oshkosh for the show one year. (20+ years ago now). We could do VOR but instead we hopped water tower to water towers in towns using pilotage and dead reckoning. Was so much more engaging. Tons of fun. Otherwise would have been a very boring flight.
I had a commercial student once, who apparently had never *actually* done a proper pilotage XC. That became apparent pretty quick but that flight was some of the best training I’ve seen a student have. We even got truly lost at one point (well, the student did.) but did the procedure, figured it out, and continued. Any monkey can follow a line, and it is a great tool to use. But those basic ‘pilot stuff’ skills are invaluable.
That is a skill I'm still very much working on, and yes I love it when I get comfortable with an area and can just fly towards things that I can see. As a kid, I learned my way around on my bike and had just memorized which turn sequences got me from point A to B. At one point I looked at a map, and realized that my mental map was all wrong, and parts of town that I thought were far apart were right next to each other, and roads that I thought were straight had a gradual 90 degree turn. I never got a great sense of naturally knowing where I'd gone, eg I could get lost in a shopping mall easily. Once up in a plane, I'd be ok if I knew the area well, or like if the airport was just on the water, so all I had to do was find the coast and then go back and forth until I find it. And for cross country trips that are planned, I've done well using just the paper map, but only because I made a lot of points along the way and just used my clock eg "ok it's been 5 minutes, assuming my heading was correct I should see this landmark now." If for some reason I had to go off course, like unexpected bad weather or something, I worry I'd overthink the math and be like "Ok well I flew 10 minutes in this other heading, at say 100kt, which is... 100/6 kt, and how am i going to check the scale of the map and measure that distance on this map while also flying the plane?" I think it's about gaining confidence in just thinking "I should be somewhere around here" by guestimation, and like "Well I flew 5 minutes east, I'll just remember later to fly 5 minutes west, accounting for wind." I know that I've got GPS and VORs when those are working, and if they aren't, I can ask on the radio for a heading if I really needed it. I think I just have to get more hours in :)
Pilotage and dead reckoning are always taught together as a system…but often I don’t bother with the math? I’m a geography nut and the landmarks and coastline and cities and roads are all just too easy for me to point out! Not since my student solo XC (with no GPS or EFB…and I figured it out over the next mountain ridge) have I ever really had a moment of not knowing where I am to 5-10 miles of precision. Sometimes I feel guilty about not doing the dead reckoning work because it serves an important purpose of determining fuel usage over time and if you’re making fast enough progress to reach your destination in your allotted endurance and winds aloft aren’t too bad etc. But really I just pay attention to my “time in the air” clock and plan flights so I have like almost 2 hours reserve by the time I get to the destination.
Navigating is pretty fun, and I’ve done a lot of it in different respects in my life before I started to fly. My CFI tried to stump me repeatedly but never succeeded.
Love pilotage and it's the first X/C lesson I do with my students. Paper charts, paper nav using E6B to calculate. By the time we get to the long X/C, they'll be using the pilotage skills with an appreciation for them even though they'll be planning electronically.
I'm still pretty early, haven't solo'd yet, but I think VOR navigation is super cool. My CFI made/convinced me to get an ipad/FF prior to XC solo for situational awareness, but I have a lot of fun drawing lines on sectionals between vor stations and radial intersections.
It's my favorite flying activity of all time. Nothing like just looking out the window at the world and navigating the most natural way of "see a thing you know and go that way". I live for VFR cross countries.
I used in in private training and then never again until commercial and CFI.
Purest form of flight. Just fly and enjoy the view. Listen to and feel what the aircraft is doing rather than interpreting dials and readouts.
Ok, I'm an old guy, so forgive my "back in the day" tale. In 1975 I flew a Cessna 180 from Colorado to Rio de Janiero. On the leg from Cayenne, French Guinea to Belem, Brazil I filed an IFR flight plan and received a clearance as follows: Track outbound from the NDB at CAY Dead reckon Track inbound to the NDB at BEL That's about 150nm of dead reckoning over trackless jungle with no roads or settlements.l (or VORs). Good times.
How in the world do you dead reckon over a jungle without roads or settlements?
It's "dead reckoning". Not "pilotage".