Can one do a JAA initial IR test in a plane with no ADF?

That’s true but, purely technically, the difference is really only in the required receiver complexity. An ADF can emulate a VOR if it has an accurate heading source and an accurate DF antenna system.

In practice, obviously, the VOR system is a lot more accurate.

What staggers me is the reported cost of a VOR – over €1M to buy one, and c. €100k/year to keep it running. That 100k can’t be the electricity (it radiates only c. 100W) so it basically looks like there is some company out there which has CAA approvals to make and maintain them and has everybody over a barrel and is happily shafting them. Excluding the antenna array, the cost of (duplicate) electronics can’t be more than 1k. Add the cost of the little “house”, say 100k… somebody has to be taking the piss, mega big time.

And I am pretty sure pilot training there in state flight academies was a lot , I mean a lot more substantinal than in the west to practise NDB navigation as well. This must have been that profound that even a constant and reliable wodka level of min. 2 promille (verified before each!!! flight by the med on

If comparing old communist era education with present day western education is any measure, the former would have been vastly better in the aviation sphere also. Much of western education is a joke today. The PPL is no exception – it is a commercial product, with no commercial incentive to produce a pilot who can fly A to B. In fact the commercial incentive runs the other way… “100hr students” are what you want.

If you are over flat terrain, or open sea, and there is no real wx, an NDB is as accurate as a VOR can be – within 1 degree or better. You can check this with a modern ADF (like my KR87 – perhaps the only GA ADF that actually works properly, and does it for more than 5 minutes after some rain) when flying over the middle of N France, towards an NDB. Absolutely spot on.

NDBs are poor when there is terrain or a water surface which is assymetrically located relative to your inbound track. So if e.g. you are flying towards the Lydd NDB and you are careful to be approaching the coast at 90 degrees to the coastline from the south, it is pretty accurate. Unfortunately few runways are also at 90 degrees to the coastline so straight away you have a very assymetric layout which is why coastal NDBs are so crap – anything up to 30 degrees off. And the inaccuracy happens when your distance to the beacon is of the same order of magnitude as the distance between the beacon and the surrounding terrain/water feature(s) – which is usually perfect for throwing the bearing off around the FAF At Shoreham, it is accurate below 2D and outside of 6D and between the two it swings wildly. Yet, on your IRT, you are expected to track the indication – not kidding.

NDBs are very good for long range nav, where you are so far away from it that the terrain near it is irrelevant. So if you have an NDB somewhere in Russia, radiating say 100kW, and you are say 100-300nm away, you will get a very accurate bearing.

Also, often when people ask “how did the pilots get around in the old days” one must not forget there was little or no CAS and probably no enforcement. Think how easy it would be to fly around the UK or Europe if that was the situation?

At the receiver, there is no technological reason why there should be big errors. The system is certainly good for less than 1 degree and I recall talking to one ex RAF navigator who was getting bearing accuracies of 0.2 degree, in carefully selected (impractical) situations.