Is Old Tech Still Worth Teaching???

In a word: no. It’s not even as useful as a sundial in Scotland.

The E6-B is an outdated PoS, virtually guaranteed to give an incorrect estimate for time and heading calculations based on an approximate wide area wind forecast at some level other than where we’ll be flying. I’ve used mine only once since PPL – for the IR(R) exam.

There’s plenty of moderately useful stuff to teach and practice: the 1/60 rule which we can use to estimate an instrument approach heading or to check that the iPad’s en-route heading is in the right ball park. Or how to use the red knob. Or how not to swing a prop. Or even some elementary first-aid.

I’d say good mental arithmetic skills, a good intuitive understanding of trigonometry, a few rules like the 1/60 one and a judicious use of TLAR approach replace the vast majority of E6B’s functions; furthermore, it is safer this way because you can keep looking at the instruments or outside instead of fiddling with the scales. Even at the ATPL theory exams, most problems are trivial to do in one’s head if you know how.

TLAR = “that looks about right”

I think these old calculators, and the circular slide rule used for wind/GS calcs, are worthless.

Not because there are electronic solutions but because in the modern age you don’t need to do such calculations. By “modern age” I mean anytime since around I started flying (year 2000) which is now 17 years ago! Even back then, say 20 years ago, one would plan a route electronically (Navbox, probably) and never touch any of those things. I used a map for CAS and obstacles (because the electronic products had useless mapdata, and this has improved only very recently and only for the “main GA” countries) but the flying calcs would always be done electronically.

I have probably always had some electronic “E6B” capability (all the handheld GPSs have it) but have never used it.

If flying a reasonably well equipped plane (i.e. with a fuel totaliser) then once you are airborne the only parameter of interest is the LFOB (Landing Fuel on Board). You aren’t going to land in some god forsaken dump where the cafe does a one-stent-fry-up for £1 or a two-stent-fry-up for £2, just because there is a bit of unexpected headwind

I totally agree about the need to get a basic grip on trig but I doubt the circular slide rule does that, for most people. You would be better off teaching the basic geometry, especially the small angle approximations (the 1/60 rule is one of them, although I have never used it). Flying does need a basic grip on the physical world, but surely there must be better ways of teaching that, to PPL students.

The big exception to the above is sitting exams; certainly the ones here in Europe (I don’t recall this issue in my FAA PPL CPL or IR exams). The multiple choice answers are based around the “slide rule” calculations and they often include 2 or 3 answers very close to each other which are designed to trap common slide rule mistakes, so using a rule of thumb won’t get you the right answer (e.g. a drift of 11 degrees or 12 degrees). This bastard practice should be banned. Especially if you work out the answer exactly (using trig on a calculator) you get the wrong answer. But you may as well be p1ssing in the wind because we beat the Germans not once but TWICE with these tools and if they were good enough for our grandfathers, young man, they are good enough for you!

Peter wrote:

But you may as well be p1ssing in the wind because we beat the Germans not once but TWICE with these tools and if they were good enough for our granfathers, young man, they are good enough for you!

You beat the Germans so badly with your slide rules and stuff that even this German here was talked into buying an EB6 knock-off during ground school in 2015 (!). Never used it once for flight planning or anything at all…

The Czech beat the Germans? When?

In the IR exams (at least until 2011), trigonometry would get you the “wrong” results. The ridiculous E6B wheel would yield the “correct” one. All those wind vector, groundspeed etc. question can be easily solved by applying the law of sine but that was not what one was supposed to do.

TAS / sin(WA) = WS / sin(WCA) = GS / sin(WA-WCA)

OK… I give up. We need John Cleese to do that caricature properly

Yes; exactly, the exams were rigged to make you use the slide rule.

I think that the E6B is still a good way to quickly visualize the influence of wind on track and so on, especially for beginners. The advantage is that a picture tells you much more than math when you’re new to this stuff. But of course I have not used mine since 1995 either …

But even better for the understanding is the graphical solution on paper. Many pilots today have no idea how to use the words bearing, track or course correctly.

It’s no co-incidence that Nevil Shute’s autobiography is called ‘Slide Rule’. He did all the stress calculations for the R-100, himself, in a cold, wet and draughty old shed at Howden, Yorkshire. Imagine what that would cost today with computer modelling.

But was the result cost effective? The resulting designs were often massively over engineered because the manual calculations left many unknowns. That’s why we still have the battleship Warrior, still afloat after 150 years, or indeed the immortal DC-3. But were these designs really satisfactory? That’s more of a question, especially in the context of private flying, where the phrase “temporarily uncertain of position” has happily almost vanished from the lexicon along with the slide rule method.

P.S. I’d love to know what Nevil Shute would have made of all this. It was him, or his book, that got me into flying. He describes popping down to Cardington (I was at school in Bedford) in the Airspeed Oxford, landing on the grass in front of the giant hangars in his shirt sleeves. The book was in the school library and I read it cover to cover thinking “wow, that’s neat”. 60 years on, I still do.

There are three bits of trig that every IFR pilot should know and use:

(Airspeed/10) + 7 = angle of bank for a Rate 1 turn
(Groundspeed)/2 and add a nought = RoD for 3° slope
Distance required for (non pressurised) descent = ((Altitude to be lost) x 2) X No. of miles per minute (where 120 = 2, 150=2.5 and 180 = 3)

I have to remind students of these three simple facts all the bloody time, even when I have already reminded them five times in the same lesson. They remove so much workload.