Very handy tip Cobalt
It is exactly what Timothy was referring to in general, yours will only work if analog watch is UTC, this will work for a trip from London in winter times 
I guess the merit of watch and solar navigation will only work close to thes pole where 1 degrees is not that much of a distance and you will not need very precise watches neither, far south 1 degrees it is 70nm distance but then you should be able to get compass or gps working…
Cobalt wrote:
Faaaar to complex.
Your version is approximate, and works if you have an analogue watch set to UTC.
My version is accurate to a very small number of degrees (depending on how good you are at staring into the sun and determining its centre), and you can use any time source, analogue or digital, set to any time zone (provided you know the offset to UTC).
The way I did it was to unslave the HSI and motor it round to put the correct angle on the sun. It then worked as a normal DGI.
Cobalt wrote:
Works anywhere in the northern hemisphere between the tropic and the polar circle
Yeah, but if you are more than a few hundred miles from the Geographical North Pole (which sits not very far off the north coast of Canada) you can use the compass. The only reason for doing this (and I should have mentioned it earlier) is that the compass is completely non functional at the North Pole.
Ibra wrote:
you should be able to get compass or gps working…
Although there were some interesting display oddities (like flying backwards on one of them for a while) GPS coverage at the North Pole is pretty much OK.
I only wanted to provide a simpler example of everyday lsolar navigation, not an altenative to your method.
I completely agree that mine is suiable to find Africa when over the Meditrerranean and maybe the Baleaes or Corsica, but I would not want to use it to find the Azores… 
For the rough “where is south” method, the watch needs to be set to (1) local (2) apparent (3) solar time, not UTC, which is based on (2) mean (3) solar time at the (1) Greenwich meridian.
(1) and (3) Local solar time should be obvious. Take the simple case of noon, the sun is in the south, and your watch needs to show 12 o’clock. So you have to at least figure out the proper time zone for your location. The geographically appropriate time zone for France and Spain is actually UTC, btw, and good luck in China…
If you correct for the time zone (and DSTj, the error will be up to 7.5 degrees. You can get better if you have an idea of your actual longitude.
The difference between (2) apparent and mean solar time affects Timothy’s method as well. Depending on the day of the year, the error introduced by the Equation of Time can be up to 4 degrees (or 16 minutes of time)
All this is so completely irrelevant for day to day flying that i am surprised it is not in that collection of arcana called the ATPL theory syllabus
Yes, you need two of three: 1) Apparent Solar time, 2) Local time and 3) UTC time
If you decide to use 1), you may need medieval corrections and fly on good days
Cobalt wrote:
in that collection of arcana called the ATPL theory syllabus
Actually, the only place I heard of it it was in the BGA gliding syllabus where the default place of the sun is South for the outbound leg and South-West on the return leg (assumes you fly from 11am to 5pm in a good summer day)
I picked it up from a hoary old Russian pilot on the ramp at Longyearbyen.
Same as those bush pilots in Alaska, I don’t think they are into the documentation or atpl books business
They make a nice fire on a cold arctic night.
Cobalt wrote:
They make a nice fire on a cold arctic night.
Bush pilots?
