Navigation Using VOR?

[Jabiru7252]

I'm 65 in September and pondering retiring. I enjoy my job very much and I know I'm very much needed at work. However, VOR, NDB, GPS or map & compass won't help me make that decision. I guess I'll have to bite the bullet some time, just need to find something meaningful that stimulates the brain cells as much as my work currently does.

[Downunder]

I do wonder how many pass away with a bank full of super and unfulfilled dreams, pushed by society to work as long as possible?

[IanR]

Well, I’m looking at retirement and a move to the Gippsland Lakes. I’ll probably have to sell the Auster.

Don’t sell the Auster Kaz. It’s painful

[biggles]

Well, I’m looking at retirement and a move to the Gippsland Lakes. I’ll probably have to sell the Auster. I have a nice cabin cruiser with 400 hp on twin legs in mind so I’m refreshing my Marine Certificate of Competency and trying to remember how to navigate on water rather than in the air.

 

There Is hangarage available at various times at YBNS Kaz, but I’m sure something more permanent could be found for a classic like an Auster. Are you looking at living on board and just cruising the Lakes, or doing some offshore cruising .... Bob

[kgwilson]

I engineered a redundancy at 55 & decided to retire to my beach place in Noosa. That lasted a month. I bought a house, then a business & 4 years later retired to the beach & built my plane. I organised taking over an aerodrome from the Council resurrected the aero club and rebuilt a hangar while bringing up a Border Collie/Cattle Dog X, managing a body corporate and training SES recruits. I've never been so busy. I don't have time for a job as I go to the aerodrome 3 times a week to do maintenance & fly, do everything else & chores my wife organises in the other 4 days.

[jackc]

I engineered a redundancy at 55 & decided to retire to my beach place in Noosa. That lasted a month. I bought a house, then a business & 4 years later retired to the beach & built my plane. I organised taking over an aerodrome from the Council resurrected the aero club and rebuilt a hangar while bringing up a Border Collie/Cattle Dog X, managing a body corporate and training SES recruits. I've never been so busy. I don't have time for a job as I go to the aerodrome 3 times a week to do maintenance & fly, do everything else & chores my wife organises in the other 4 days.

Retirement is a tough life, ask me how I know:-)

[facthunter]

Graves are full of indispensable people. IF you hit the road you will find plenty of people who left their house some years ago intending to be gone only for a few weeks.

Probably too many doing it in an overcapitalised way these days. You don't need a Hummer and an extreme off road camper trailer or a caravan big as a house,. Some vans don't have enough ground clearance under the engine and the Key won't start the engine . 5 weeks later you may be on your way again. .Nev

[Flightrite]

Got a long time pilot friend of mine (Pvt pilot) who was a Chippy all his working career developed a brain tumor, dropped like a bag of spuds one day, Fortunetly he survived but after two brain Ops he's been given 18 mths at best, it's 12 mths this month. He retired, bought a van grabbed his long term partner and hit the road, best thing he ever did he says, he was 64 at the time of the seizure. Life is so precious don't waste it all just working!

[Geoff_H]

You are as indispensable as the hold your hand leaves in a bucket full of water when it withdraws?

[turboplanner]

You are as indispensable as the hold your hand leaves in a bucket full of water when it withdraws?

This was drummed into us in corporate training by the pre-"No "I" in TEAM brigade and it sounded logical until we hit the Millenial area, then when the key guys started leaving, first the water ran out, then the buckets disappeared, and now massive chunks of knowledge have been lost.

 

The average group likes to just roll along with a few sickies, no stress, no pressure, no changes, with profit, development, changing strategies someone else's problem, and there were always a few key people who rose above that level (and there always will be). They usually carried the Company, but since the turn of the Century a lot of them have been irreplaceable because the digital technology which replaced them has never really been developed to do the job they did. I know a lot of Companies in the transport industry searching around for a solution.

 

So sometimes their hand does leave a hole.

[facthunter]

I guess you mean HOLE but not a bad comparison/analogy. Nev

[facthunter]

A lot of knowledge will go with some people and it's just GONE. Some of that knowledge has less meaning than it once had but it's a mistake to think it has NO meaning. Real pilot skills are still relevant to ultralight flying much as they would have been in the 20's almost a hundred years ago now. Nev

[kgwilson]

If you retire without a plan or interests you usually don't last long. Boredom, then health issues, then the down hill slide till it's all over.

You are as indispensable as the hole your hand leaves in a bucket full of water when it withdraws?

 

The indispensable Man

 

When you are feeling that you are important

And your ego is out in full bloom

You stand there and take it for granted

You're the best qualified in the room

 

When you feel that the thought of your going

Will leave an unfillable hole

Just follow this simple example

And see how it humbles your soul

 

Take a bucket & fill it with water

Put your hand in it up to your wrist

Pull it out and the hole that's remaining

Is the measure of how much you'll be missed.

 

You can splash all you like when you enter

And stir up the water galore

But stop and you'll see in a minute

It looks just the same as before

 

The moral of this quaint example

Is do just the best that you can

Be proud of yourself but remember

There is No Indispensable Man

[pmccarthy]

My first wife put that poem on the wall of my office, but I was too young and busy to get the message.

[kaz3g]

There Is hangarage available at various times at YBNS Kaz, but I’m sure something more permanent could be found for a classic like an Auster. Are you looking at living on board and just cruising the Lakes, or doing some offshore cruising .... Bob

Thanks Bob. Looking at houses and units. Did look at something bigger for live aboard but decided I’d need a house for when I’m old and feeble. Bigger berths are very scarce, too. The boat I’m looking at is under 10 metres but very suitable for outside work and camping out for a few days at a time.

 

The ARO has spoken to the property people and there is a spot in the Bellman available If the Auster hasn’t gone. It will be like losing an arm when it goes but it’s been fun while it lasted.

[antonts]

 

there were always a few key people who rose above that level (and there always will be). They usually carried the Company

 

So sometimes their hand does leave a hole.

 

Knowledge can be restored. Functionality can be redistributed. Skills can be taught. But there are some people, who do real black magic, and it can not be transferred or distributed. It simply appears by itself... or does not appear at all and fade. Everybody says "welll, what we can dooooo..." and continue the march ahead, but much more slowly, and sometimes even in wrong direction.

 

In modern world this magic ceased to appear at all. No room for it, from the very beginning, from kindergarten. Everybody taught to do as usual, to work in team, to fulfill requirements and execute commands - and finally they grow just to team members, sometimes team leaders, but never to pathfinders, inventors, breakthroughrers. But nobody notices this, as it is not a hole, but simply an absence of something unseen. Magic leaves this world - and nothing comes instead.

[Jase T]

I note the US is in the process of decommissioning about 40% of their VOR's. Only those used on busy air routes are staying, many standalone and airfield ones are going. They are certainly moving to GPS only approaches to many airfields.

[turboplanner]

In modern world this magic ceased to appear at all. No room for it, from the very beginning, from kindergarten. Everybody taught to do as usual, to work in team, to fulfill requirements and execute commands - and finally they grow just to team members, sometimes team leaders, but never to pathfinders, inventors, breakthroughrers. But nobody notices this, as it is not a hole, but simply an absence of something unseen. Magic leaves this world - and nothing comes instead.

I've been shocked over the last 12 months by people who had no comprehension of a drought, and what that meant, instead asking for Royal Commissions becaise they had no water, then no comprehension of our sovereign state system where the States owned, operated and directed fie fighting equipment, and then the significance of the action needed to beat a virus, and how when a State of Emergency was declared other people took over from the government of the day, but there is light on the horizon.

 

I didn't take a lot of notice of the crisis in education a few years ago which led to major changes, NAPLAN testing etc. but education is different today. I've spent the past three weeks helping an 8 year old with his online schooling, and that has been an education in itself.

 

We've been finding verbs, adverbs, split verbs, nouns, pronouns, antonyms, similes synonyms, and he's learnt to use the dictionary to search and be able to put complex words into sentences.

 

Last week"s key words were: "conspire", "mayhem", "dastardly"and he had to explain the meaning, find the antonym and synonym and put the word into a sentence.

 

Reading was very interesting; he is being taught to rule three columns in a notebook, with headings Before, During and After, so beforfe he starts to read a book he has to look at the title, picture and any lead up information and make a list of questions. During reading he jots down questions; a look on the face of an illustration or the meaning behind the words might give a clue to what's about to happen, and at the end is another list of questions. From my memory this analysis is years before we did it. I can only remember in secondary school with Shakespears and other literary greats and we were just guessing. So I suspect by the time he starts looking for news in newspapers or online, his comprehension is going to be way ahead of ours.

 

As for the team emphasis, the US style Motivation by supervisors has worked much better than the old Boss giving an order, but in all the training I've done the training itself is exactly what you are saying; totally referring to the team as a group only. This even applies to the physical courses where, say, stacks of rope, planks, floats etc are setup beside a creek, and the groups splits into "teams" who then communally find a way to put the items together to make a raft or a bridge to get across.

 

We all know that without rams there will be no lambs, but the missing link in training is identifying entrepreneurs and putting them in charge.

[Flightrite]

Christ how did we old codgers ever get thru school and make something of ourselves??I've got a headache just reading that???

[Geoff_H]

Navigation by Constance was used for long distance navigation. It used ADF but did not fly from or to the aid. It used rate of change of bearing to the aid. The Mooney that I owned was flown across the north Atlantic Ocean using the system I'm the 1980's. Not VOR but interesting. Very mathematical but I love applied mathematics. Including Full SAR.?

Geoff

[Flightrite]

Navigation by Constance was used for long distance navigation. It used ADF but did not fly from or to the aid. It used rate of change of bearing to the aid. The Mooney that I owned was flown across the north Atlantic Ocean using the system I'm the 1980's. Not VOR but interesting. Very mathematical but I love applied mathematics. Including Full SAR.?

Geoff

FullSar was the best??

[Old Koreelah]

Ground based aids will eventually be non existent. GBAS and dareratives of its principle will be all that's available in the future apart from stand alone GPS. I don't know how I ever lived without the magenta line!

Hopefully the lessons of the current pandemic will be applied widely; we became too dependant on imported medicines, PPE, etc. There is now pressure to ensure our nation has the capacity to produce basic stuff at least.

How many pilots would be able navigate when (not if) our internet and GPS systems get clobbered by solar storms?

[Flightrite]

Hopefully the lessons of the current pandemic will be applied widely; we became too dependant on imported medicines, PPE, etc. There is now pressure to ensure our nation has the capacity to produce basic stuff at least.

How many pilots would be able navigate when (not if) our internet and GPS systems get clobbered by solar storms?

Funny you should say that! Many moons ago the GPS system went down and I was in the FL's between Kunners & Broome, navigation by looking out the window with a map was 'challenging', we sure do rely on those Sats these daysM

[kgwilson]

A CME (solar superstorm) will happen sooner or later & I would not want to be over the featureless flat interior without hard copy maps. Dead reckoning is an important skill but if the compass goes out also the only thing you will have is the knowledge of where you came from, how long since you left and the last known actual location with reference to the ground. You may have a vague idea of direction by reference to the sun if you can see it. Roads, railway lines, rivers, hills and anything man made will be useful to try and locate where you are in relation to the map. I would not like to be in this situation.

[facthunter]

You were going soft. From Mt ISA to Katherine in the "Four" was all DR and a vague form of map reading, Paradise HS and Nutwood Downs etc. We even took the thing to Cocos (keeling) islands where each wave looks much like the next one and if we missed it, had no place to range to. Just two hours "Island holding" at running on Vapour rate. Have a look where it is on the Map. Regular Gov't Charter, about once a month. Amazing we didn't lose one.. Nev