I think the need to identify and pinpoint a house, ball, or whatever is unnecessarily precise.
On the chart shown above, there is a point November 1 between two power lines, crossed by a road roughly SW-NE, with a village three miles later where November 2 is. In the olden days, you would report somewhere within 1-2 miles of this point, before crossing the road, which is as precise as it gets, given that very few aircraft are equipped with a glass bottom to go directly overhead that point and nail it down.
Then you would proceed southerly, keeping the village on the left, and wait for the airfield to come into sight.
And that is all that was expected, and all that can be expected these days if not using GPS. Trying to achieve sub-NM precision without GPS is silly.
Even a VOR/DME fix at 46NM potentially has a 1-2 NM error.
Another fun example: Germany is obsessed with forcing pilots to follow the lines on their published traffic circuits, to the point that one particularly power-crazy administrator of the regional CAA proscribed a few 100m (IIRC) as maximum navigation error – which was comprehensively destroyed by a scientific evaluation that demonstrated that (a) the maps and charts themselves are not precise enough to start with and (b) it is impossible to do this using purely visual techniques…
And that is all that was expected, and all that can be expected these days if not using GPS. Trying to achieve sub-NM precision without GPS is silly.
Agree, but the thing is that ATC nowadays a) have some kind of radar and b) have become fully accustomed to pilots navigating points very precisely by GPS. So if you are non-GPS, and report such point with 2 miles of slack, you sometimes get told off by ATC. Silly, I know, but as I said, everybody has just gotten used to an enornous level of accuracy.
