A good mental workout

Lest you think I’m a complete curmudgeon dinosaur, I marvel at new technology. I find jets, fly-by-wire, autoland, and autothrottles incredibly cool. However, I choose to fly an airplane without an electrical system.

For the average home user, AI’s advertising pitch is focused on making our lives easier. I don’t remember asking for my life to be easier. I don’t need to have my groceries delivered this afternoon, or my toothpaste from Amazon via drone in an hour. It’s not like life is particularly difficult. We have an abundance of food choices without having to farm or hunt, our TVs have years’ worth of content, and everything from our toothbrushes to our cars is automated.

That said, human nature seems to include a desire to make our environments even more comfortable and our work even less challenging. Billed as the next great advancement in human progress, I fear AI is going to make us all stupid. Scientists call that process of passing on tasks to the technology cognitive offloading. To those who work in a knowledge-based economy, that’s a concept that’s either thrilling or terrifying.

I was thinking about all this recently when it came time to do my flight review. ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot are wonderful resources, but cognitive offloading is a great way to describe their impact on our flight planning abilities. Even GPS and the allure of Direct To have made us lazy idiots over the last few decades. American Airlines Capt. Warren Vanderburgh has a classic presentation on this problem called “Children of the Magenta Line.” Look it up on YouTube because it is well worth your time. Vanderburgh’s presentation was nearly 30 years ago, but the cautions about overly relying on automation are even more apt today.

I may fly an airplane from 1940, but my flight planning is very twenty-first century. I go to Garmin Pilot and spend three minutes putting in my departure and destination, scanning the chart, and then checking notams. Gone are the days of putting plotter to sectional and pencil to paper.

Not wanting to offload my entire noggin to my masters at Garmin, I decided my flight review was a great time to put in some effort and complete a cross-country entirely by pilotage. You remember pilotage, right? It’s where you navigate via landmarks while following along on a chart. To sweeten the deal, my friend and instructor, Chris, had a sectional of our area from 1945. Now I was actually looking forward to the workout.

Low clouds in the morning slowly parted to reveal a gorgeous late winter day when we took off from southern Maryland, bound for an airport on the northern neck of Virginia. This region in the eastern tidewater part of the state is very sparsely populated, which means it would be a challenge to find good reference points. Compound that with the fact that we were doing 35 knots over the ground (that’s not a typo), and the flight was turning into an adventure.

It’s hard to appreciate if you typically fly at 5,500 or even 3,500 feet, but cruising at 1,000 feet also makes pilotage more difficult. It’s challenging to see far into the horizon when the horizon is only a few miles in front of you. But winter in the East means low humidity and great visibility, so I had picked a day that was so clear it was almost cheating.

The sectional didn’t have many details, but it clearly showed the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, both obvious landmarks. Then I just had to figure out where along the rivers to cross. A bridge across the Rappahannock made the decision relatively easy, and at 35 knots, seeing the structure about eight miles out gave me many minutes to begin searching for the airport just a few miles beyond.

The most challenging part of the flight was having to go around when another airplane began back-taxiing while we were on final. We then nearly had to run off into the grass while we were back-taxiing when that same airplane threatened to land on top of us. Ironically, we made many radio calls in our 1940 airplane without an electrical system, while he seemed to ignore the radio in his Piper Comanche. Probably too busy looking for traffic on his iPad.

I’m not ready to cancel my subscription to Garmin Pilot just yet, but the flight provided some amount of confidence that I haven’t totally lost my core navigation skills. I know you’re reading this thinking, sure, but I didn’t do any dead reckoning, the art of figuring out time, fuel, and distance for waypoints every 10 miles or so. That may be true. But I’m a luddite, not a masochist.

A colleague once called contributor Ian J. Twombly the oldest young person she knew.