This last weekend I flew from Pasco to Bend Or. I flew my wind corrected headings and was going the right direction. I tuned into a VOR, Etc. I looked long and hard for my 3rd checkpoint and even got out my GPS, used mostly for hiking, Garmin eTrex Vista. I typed in a coordinate for my checkpoint, but the GPS was pointing somewhere way off course. All of the sudden, there I was almost to Redmond over a butte of some sort. My checkpoint had come and gone below me somewhere in the vastness of Central OR. My planning worked fine, and I got to Bend fine, but at that moment, i dreamed of having a GPS to help me find my way.

So, is there an APP for an Andriod that would work in this situation?
What sort of portable GPS are good for navigation?

I can surely Google aviation GPS and Apps, but wondered what everyone here uses. After flying over the hills, canyons, valleys, tundras, plateaus, etc of Central OR, I wonder how exactly I would find a backcountry strip somewhere Im not familiar with. It seems on this flight, I would have been lost.

Help Please....
Lost in Central OR.
Thanks

P.S. A unit that is also not 2000 bones.

If you're going to fly on top [of the clouds] you have 2 options: Good dead reckoning skills, or reliable navigation equipment that you know how to use very well. Going on top and hoping to pick up landmark waypoints for pilotage navigation is a bad idea for obvious reasons: You can't see the ground.

If you're a Private pilot, you should be trained on how to use VOR, at least in theory if not in practice. Even though it's fading in popularity to GPS as a long range navaid, it's still a great backup tool for VFR pilots.

For a cheap aviation GPS solution, I'd recommend one of the lower-end Garmin Aera units or an iPad Mini running Foreflight.

You've since edited your post to make mine sound like a weird response. You originally posted that you had lost your visual checkpoints because you flew VFR on top.

For Android phone and tablet (you can run it on a couple of pieces of hardware for the same price) Garmin has an ap called "Pilot" It's something like $50-75 per year (for VFR) and you can download sectionals, wacs, I think AFD and notams etc too. Well worth the price of the ap compared to buying paper charts except you can't block the sun with the android device as easily as you can with a paper chart

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=garmin+pilot

WingX was ok the last time I used it. But I switched to foreflight so can't speak to it currently.

http://www.hiltonsoftware.com/index.html

I would not trust my safety to an App on my phone. Give me the VOR and '2000 bone' GPS every day

Battson wrote:I would not trust my safety to an App on my phone. Give me the VOR and '2000 bone' GPS every day

I concur. The VOR got me to my destination safely. A 2000 bone GPS would be sweet. I would probably invest if I had my own plane. I am still going to use, VORs, Charts and good old math to figure out most of my planning.

A GPS or APP would be a nice secondary to the tride and true.

Battson wrote:I would not trust my safety to an App on my phone. Give me the VOR and '2000 bone' GPS every day

Yup, I wouldn't trust my life to any single device. Your VOR *and* GPS advice is spot on though. My current setup has two GPS's in the panel + VOR + ipad. I actually like have a mass produced device like an ipad as part of the scheme as it presents a different kind of failure mode than the other stuff. I can't think of something that would take out all of the redundancy in my plane.

It's hard to beat the 96 series Garmin GPSs. I flew 6 years on a black and white 196 before upgrading to a 396. When I rented I used a yoke mount and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. In my home built its my sole means of navigation besides good ol fashioned pilotage.

rw2 wrote:
I can't think of something that would take out all of the redundancy in my plane.

St. Elmo's... lightning strike nearby... bad luck with a particular box of AA batteries? All sorts of things could take out civilian non-hardened electrical devices. A really serious problem with the airplane's electrical system could have an effect on the panel, plus anything plugged into an onboard cigarette lighter. Granted it is unlikely that everything would take a crap at the same time.

I use Naviator on my Android phone. I thinks it's like $20/year. Works great and has not let me down yet, but I always keep an eye on the paper sectional when going somewhere unfamiliar. I don't trust electronic stuff much. I know as soon as I do, it will let me down and I'll be in a pinch.

Dead reckoning:

On a day when the view is unlimited, three or four checkpoints will suffice on a trip that is a couple hundred miles. As the visibility drops, if you're not intimately familiar with the entire route, you need to add more checkpoints. For flying over a broken cloud layer in unfamiliar terrain, you will probably want one about every ten minutes, since you will occasionally miss them. As a beginning pilot, you will tend to pick checkpoints that look big to you on the ground (i.e. a building, a pond, a little knoll.) As you gain experience with dead reckoning, you will discover that these are easy to miss. During the day, the best checkpoints are rivers or major highways that cross your route at right angles. You can divert a few miles off course to avoid some weather, and you still have to cross them. In the western U.S., the river canyons are usually so well defined that you know that you are getting close even before you get to them. Major highways and freeways are also great, but as the roads get smaller in size, they are difficult to tell apart. At night, the highways are easily visible due to the light from the car headlights.

There are NO surprises if you're correctly navigating via dead reckoning. There is no "lost". There is no "All of the sudden, there I was almost to ..." It's not just about your wind corrected angle. You knew your airspeed and predicted ground speed before you took off. Whether you drew it or not, there is a line on the chart from your takeoff point to your intended destination, and you will progress along that line at approximately the rate of your predicted ground speed. Ideally, draw the line, mark your checkpoints, write the estimated time in transit next to each segment, and keep a checkpoint chart, updating the estimated time to the next checkpoint each time you fly over a checkpoint.

Hiking GPS:

Most pilots tell me that it's asking for death to use one. I used one for years, and found it to be quite helpful. However, there are procedures to follow to make them effective. Entering numbers with the little arrow buttons is so distracting that you can't effectively fly the plane while doing it. You must enter every important coordinate into the GPS as a waypoint BEFORE you take off. You will need to enter the departure, the destination, every checkpoint, and every airport that might serve as an escape route should you want to get back on the ground. Then, you need to make certain that you know how to recognize when the GPS hasn't got the signal yet. You can't just turn it off and on like you do when you're hiking. When you first turn it on, they usually remember where they were when you turned it off. If you turn it on more than a few miles from where you last turned it off, they will often take several minutes of analyzing the satellite signals before they update their position correctly. If you try to use it before it has updated to the correct position, the results will be quite similar to your "the GPS was pointing somewhere way off course". There is usually a page button that will let you flip through various pages of information. Use it to show your actual ground speed and compare it to your predicted ground speed. Keep it on during the entire flight, and curse the headwind vociferously at regular intervals. Always bring a cig lighter power cord or extra batteries.

Handheld Aviation GPS:

There are lots of different models of aviation GPS units. They have a database of airports, runway lengths, radio frequencies, etc. The database is obsolete the day after it was installed, and keeping it almost up to date is the only real frustration of having one. The newer ones have color and terrain avoidance, but the older black and white ones are quite awesome if the database isn't too far out of date. You can usually find an older used one on eBay for less than a couple hundred bucks.


Android apps:

Many android phones have a gps, many of the tablets don't. However, the tablets usually have a USB port where you can plug in an external gps. Once you have assured that you have GPS capabilities, there are numerous android apps, some for a price, some for free. It would appear that the best ones cost money. There is a free one named Avare that caught my eye. I'll probably get an external GPS for my tablet soon so I can try it out.

Even if you could find an affordable SatNav system, (or GPS as they say these days), we all know the military is constantly messing with it and it is SO vulnerable to terrorist attacks, IMHO it's worthless. As far as VOR's go, besides the fact that no one remembers how to work them, Obama has ordered them all to be turned off tomorrow at 3pm as part of his sequestration, so forget about that. (plus, Morse Code? Really?) Pilotage is only as reliable as you think the paper charts are and they are obsolete BEFORE they are printed. I never buy em so I never get a wrong CTAF or runway length. If your going to leave the traffic pattern you better be comfortable with the Pioneer-Bendix™ bubble sextant, it will record and average a series of 60 altitude readings of a star over a 2 min period using a windup timer. (keep a sharp lookout for traffic while doing this). Once you have your altitude measurement you go to the Nautical Almanac and get the declination and Greenwich Hour Angle of the star you measured. This gives you the geographic position of the star, which you can use to create a Line of Position, you are somewhere on this line, more or less. Simply repeat with another star and where these lines intersect and you have a Fix! (it's a lot more accurate if you use three lines).

I use Honda Spray Cleaner and Polish on the windscreen and have pretty good luck.
Pretty tough to beat Garmin Aviation products along with a Sectional.
I have a Garmin 296, with it and the basic radio package in my Cessna, I haven't gotten lost yet

Recently the "Company" supplied us with I-Pads so I purchased ForeFlight and a Bad Elf GPS Pro.
While they are great products, they distract from looking out that windscreen I spent so much time cleaning
I'll stick with the 296 and a sectional. It encourages one to look out the window.
After all, isn't that why we enjoy flying.

For those low visibility times, preflight your pitot heat

My $.02.

Fraser

More than a few years ago, I left Anchorage at VFR minimums for McGrath. The 182 had Loran, a handheld GPS, 2 VOR receivers, and ADF. That is 4 independent electronic nav systems. I Wasn't 45 miles out when ANC went below minimums again, and all 4 systems were worthless all for different reasons. Compass, watch, and WAC, saved the day and our asses. It was also my first time across that route as well.

Knowing how to navigate by map and compass trumps everything else in my book. I use the GPS 99% of the time, but you can bet I have WAC's handy in the plane if the weather is even slightly questionable. Even if they are out of date, they can still save the day in a pinch.

I just finished flying from Victoria BC to a local around Grande Prairie AB. Most of the flight is in the mountains. I have a Garmin aera 500 and really like it. It has never let me down and works very well. Worked great on this flight. That said, I still looked at my map, compass, and time a fair bit, just to be sure. If you are going the GPS route I recommend the aera series, the touch screen works very nicely.
David

Not that I've ever been lost...

But there have been flights here and there, where I maybe couldn't tell you EXACTLY where I was at the moment. But big picture I knew, and dead reckoning skills I trusted and knew were going to work.

Maybe look at this as a wake-up call, and make an effort to revisit NAV 101, this time as something you really need to learn for real, and not just a bare bone minimum to pass a Private or Commercial check ride, or a written exam.

I honed my skills flying out of Barrow AK in a pretty much no NAV airplane. Just getting there from Lower 48 wore callouses on my stubby pencil (worth 1 hour's flying time) and wrist watch, and my finger never left the map of all that endless tundra until I had memorized pretty much each and every one of those little swampy puddles. Add lots of fog and wind, and it makes for a pretty intimidating school of basic NAV.

But... Those skills last a lifetime, and when all the electronic stuff goes to shit on you, and it will, it keeps your brain stress free and concentrating on the other tasks at hand. Like, how much gas do I got left and can I get there with what I have.

That said... I'm old, lazy and spoiled now... Give up my Garmin GPS? Never. And, it's the XM player for the airplane. Gotta have my tunes and Old Time Radio.

Gump

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Get a damn Sectional, a decent time piece, and learn how to fly without all that crap! Then get a GPS and use it for backup. Make your checkpoints closer together until you learn how make sense of the land compared to the sectional. When nothing looks right for crying out loud, get some altitude and look around.


EB

GumpAir wrote:Not that I've ever been lost...

But there have been flights here and there, where I maybe couldn't tell you EXACTLY where I was at the moment. But big picture I knew, and dead reckoning skills I trusted and knew were going to work.

Maybe look at this as a wake-up call, and make an effort to revisit NAV 101, this time as something you really need to learn for real, and not just a bare bone minimum to pass a Private or Commercial check ride, or a written exam.

I honed my skills flying out of Barrow AK in a pretty much no NAV airplane. Just getting there from Lower 48 wore callouses on my stubby pencil (worth 1 hour's flying time) and wrist watch, and my finger never left the map of all that endless tundra until I had memorized pretty much each and every one of those little swampy puddles. Add lots of fog and wind, and it makes for a pretty intimidating school of basic NAV.

But... Those skills last a lifetime, and when all the electronic stuff goes to shit on you, and it will, it keeps your brain stress free and concentrating on the other tasks at hand. Like, how much gas do I got left and can I get there with what I have.

That said... I'm old, lazy and spoiled now... Give up my Garmin GPS? Never. And, it's the XM player for the airplane. Gotta have my tunes and Old Time Radio.

Gump

Very well said Gump.

rw2 wrote: I can't think of something that would take out all of the redundancy in my plane.

I don't know about St Elmo's Fire, but I can tell you about more than once having vacuum and electrical failures on the same flight. Partial panel, no panel, no NAV, no COMM. It is gonna happen.

At any given time when flying, there's the potential of finding oneself sitting there in a moving airplane in crap weather over strange territory with nothing working but flight controls and an engine making motor noises (or even less).

It's like landing out and living off your survival gear for a day or two just to test it out. Ya gotta always figure Murphy's Law is gonna f**k you if you ever get to thinking it won't.

Gump

I've mentioned it before, I flew my first 185 back from South America with a compass, stopwatch, handheld radio and some somewhat outdated WAC charts (not much changes down there). When GPS did first come out, it showed how poorly surveys where around the world. Frequently GPS position would be many miles off the charted position or the Jepp navplate position. It led to the joke that GPS would fly you into a water tower with great precision. It took several years for the surveys to be correct. We always had to not only update the Jepp books, but add all the corrected lat/lons to the plates. I have become incredibly lazy using GPS as of late. In fact a discussion this weekend with another pilot on the field, perhaps we have too much information in the cockpit now, iPads, iPhones, pictorial GPS, hand held gps and so on.

I actually frightened off a wealthy Qatari Arab friend with this talk of using a 'map' to fly. He has equipped his Citation 501 with nearly every gizmo Garmin has to offer. The 501 is a heap, slowtation to the max, does have a really nice espresso machine in it as a redeeming factor. After we flew it to Dubai for a $300 steak in the mall with a ski slope in it. I pointed out he had to get his head out of the cockpit once and a while or he will get killed. Besides I told him, if you cannot fly without all this stuff, when it fails your will die. it will, as Gump said, fail. So I told him, when he comes back to the US for his 6 month check, I am going to sit him in the Caravan, he takes off and I'm going to secure the power. Then he can fly to Arizona VFR and use a chart only. He hasn't been back since.

The other thing about gizmos is situational awareness. It is not the same, new NTSB/FAA stats show aircraft that are G1000 equipped are 10-15% less safe than equivalents without. Like the DC-8 embedded in the mountain east of Cold Bay Alaska. Last words on the tape, "just how high are the mountains here?" Even with the exalted Capstone system in Alaska, that single Otter managed to plow into a ridge with a senator onboard, very un-healthy for all onboard.

Learning charts is important. I do have some trouble looking at a tiny chart and getting the big picture on it. Then again, when you fly enough, you will recognize ground features and soon you will have your own chart in your head. You need only refer to it from time to time. It is sure nice to know exactly where you are at all times, but learn the basics before you get lazy, like me.