On 6/2/14, 7:16 AM, Brian Lloyd wrote:
On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 8:57 AM, Jim Lux <[email protected]> wrote:
O, and since navigation using the ADF and tuning to a AM
broadcast station wasn't unusual.
Well, it is quite unusual for IFR (instrument flight rules) operation. But
VFR pilots would sometimes use an AM broadcast station for navigation
assistance.
Back in 1980, the examiner asked me how to do it, but didn't make me do it.
I had to learn how to do it when taking flying lessons: it was widely
acknowledged ( in 1980) to be nearly useless,
Not entirely. I still make sure my planes are equipped with ADF (LF/MF
direction finding) due to my experience with GPS outages over the Caribbean
and Atlantic. I have experienced outages of over an hour where both my
panel-mount and hand-held GPS receivers stopped working. ADF was all I had.
I suspect that since I was flying a plane popular with drug-smugglers (a
Piper Aztec), I was being tracked, followed, and GPS jammed. (I lived in
the Virgin Islands, traveling to Florida on a regular basis. I would stop
in the Turks and Caicos or Bahamas to refuel.)
I was referring to the "AM station as beacon", and to be fair, they were
all talking about compared to conventional VOR/DME, and maybe if you had
one of them new fangled RNAV units that mathematically transformed
VOR/DME into lat/lon, etc.
Once the rule is in place, it's very, very hard to get it removed, because
of the "if we allow X, and a plane has a problem, everyone is going to say
"it was because of X" even if it wasn't, so let's just keep things the
same."
Amen.
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