what do youngsters know

[markdenny]

Im out in the baltic using real navigation and im not sure where i am really so my daughter in all her wisdom says to me why cant they use their phone with the gps to find out where they are just goes to show you kids today have no idea

[Jaskor88]

I have couple of friends that fly airplanes and they needed to learn navigating via stars and such although they of course use GPS, but you really cant know when those machines might broke. And we saw what happened when people trusted blindly to those bugged Apple maps

[Hinrich Schwab]

Celestial Navigation is a dying art in the wake of GPS. I was in land srveying for almost a decade I can assure people that GPS is not flawless. With a malfunctioning satellite or insufficient satellites in the solution, GPS can be just as flawed as uncorrected dead reckoning. I like GPS, but in navigation, you can bet I would keep a sextant, stopwatch, clock and ephemeris handy at all timed.

[quink99]

Originally Posted by Jaskor88

I have couple of friends that fly airplanes and they needed to learn navigating via stars and such although they of course use GPS, but you really cant know when those machines might broke. And we saw what happened when people trusted blindly to those bugged Apple maps

Jaskor, I assume your joking but if that is not the case than your "friends that fly airplanes and they needed to learn navigating via stars'' have a long, bumpy, road ahead of them.

In addition to a lot of airplane time in an aircraft with either an astrodome or for newer aircraft such as the C-130 turbos with a periscope sextant hole for practice with a bubble sextant, they are going to need a lot of specialized training, and a raft of different books than are required for marine navigation. Instructors and check airmen in this lost art are almost impossible to find nowadays.

Though many of the basic principles are common to marine navigation, it is a very different breed of cat and a rapidly disappearing art.

I wish them good luck; I know, I've done both types "real world".

[Jaskor88]

quink99 Yeah im not pro myself and don't claim that i'm totally right, but what about north star? ain't it relatively simple to take course with it of course it's not 100% right but still. Anyhow the need to know some other way to navigate than with GPS.

[quink99]

Originally Posted by Jaskor88

quink99 Yeah im not pro myself and don't claim that i'm totally right, but what about north star? ain't it relatively simple to take course with it of course it's not 100% right but still. Anyhow the need to know some other way to navigate than with GPS.

The North Star (Polaris) can, of course, be used for navigation but it would not be to a standard required for navigation in ATC controlled airspace if that was all your friends had unless they declared an emergency with ATC. Other methods available to your friends would include pilotage or comparing what's on the ground to what's on their chart but the drawback here is that it would have to be a VFR type chart such as a sectional chart. Most instrument rated pilots don't carry these anymore and they, of course, would be useless in bad weather as would be the North Star. The North Star could be used for much slower moving things such as in a lifeboat for very primative or emergency navigation.

If you want to pursue this fascinating subject a bit farther then let me recommend two excellent books on emergency or primative navigation both of which are available from Amazon by using the link in the extreme upper right hand corner of almost every page on this site. You'll get them at the usual low Amazon price and you'll help our great forum at the same time! That's a deal you can't beat!

The books are;

Emergency Navigation by David Burch and
Secrets of the Viking Navigators by Leif K. Karlson

It's a fascinating subject which you yourself might enjoy even if your friends aren't interested.

[Gungho]

Way back in my army days I made it a point of pride to keep my 'map to ground' skills high, and that included celestial nav.

Granted, mtg is no use in the middle of the ocean, but on the ground it is a skill in it's own right, and pretty essential in some places in Australia where you have triple canopy rainforest blocking out the sky, and/or high iron content soil where compasses do weird stuff. Even out in areas where the termites and ants make tower nests (in some cases up to ten feet tall), compasses are next to uselss at times, and radio signals get sporadic.

GPS is fine, but a manual backup is an insurance policy.

[Viper37]

Originally Posted by markdenny

my daughter in all her wisdom says to me why cant they use their phone with the gps to find out where they are just goes to show you kids today have no idea

Or it shows that they're right on with their thinking. Sitting on top of the sail while pulling into Pearl Harbor a few years ago I placed my phone next to one of our GPS antenna's, and a handheld next to it. The handheld and my phone showed the exact same position, and the WRN-6 down in control concurred. We then compared those numbers to our last round and they were within a few seconds of the three hybrid fixes we shot.

GPS is gospel if we have a high figure of merit. Also, GPS is what we use to feed a fix into our Inertial nav systems. We can also use bathymetric data to tell us where we're at, but that's Secret.

On the less modern side, are traditional Visual, Radar, and Hybrid type fixes. Using radio triangulation we can also determine our location.

And last but not least, we have the Ol' Sextant. We break it out whenever the NAV is the OOD on the surface, and it's REALLY dead on the Mid-Watch!

[GT182]

Not sure about Australia, but up here in the Northern wilds all you need to do is look where the green is growing on a tree and you know which way is north.