Best GA airfield near Munich?

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.

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…

Peter wrote:

CPT remains in current Jepp data. It is a major holding pattern for 94.567% of UK air traffic (I made that number up )

Today, ATC want you where they tell you to be precisely, no messing about.

Ha ha, love it, you’re great!
“the golden ball”….. that made my day ;)))))

CPT remains in current Jepp data. It is a major holding pattern for 94.567% of UK air traffic (I made that number up )

I very much agree with RWY20 about the past. As they say, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be Today, ATC want you where they tell you to be precisely, no messing about. The days of pottering about, watching the fields go by in a taildragger with a Vs of 30kt, and when you want a pee, popping down into a field for it, and then chatting up some wide eyed barn gurl while wearing your leather cap and gloves and jacket (oh yes and the scarf, blowing in the wind) are long gone. Those days ended not long after Yalta. Well, @Jacko can still do it but (a) he wears a kilt and (b) lives in a different era

Got it Howard. So what was the problem?

CPT is a lat long as well I was directed there on Thursday. Has it been decommissioned?

@Peter_Mundy I must have misunderstood the posts then. I’m on my mobile phone so a bit limited in what I can crosscheck while posting.

Generally, a VOR isn’t visual navigation anymore, so VRPs should be discernible without VOR radials. That explains my smiley after the comment about the VOR radial. But I think the real difference to the era when people looked for these points or even whole airfields visually is that there was no expectation to be able to find them at first try, without doubt and with certainty. It was accepted that you would sometimes fly the wrong way and have to look harder or not end up where you intended to, if you read stories from the early days of aviation. These days, you would be reprimanded for not using a GPS and get your license pulled if you fly across some TMA looking for your destination by pilotage and dead reckoning.