My Own Private GPS

How lost are you really, when you think you’re lost?

Peter Garrison

Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

The author’s airplane sits on the grass near the ancient temple site of Tikal in Guatemala. [Credit: Peter Garrison]

Key Takeaways:

A pilot flying in Guatemala became dangerously lost over a vast rainforest after taking off without checking the weather, encountering severe storms, and finding traditional navigation useless.
Facing dire circumstances, the pilot relied on a single, imprecise pencil mark on a basic road map to successfully dead reckon their way back to Flores.
The experience led the pilot to ponder if extensive flying by pilotage and dead reckoning cultivates an unconscious, highly accurate navigational intuition.

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The runway at the ancient temple site of Tikal in Guatemala was no more than a wide place on a dirt road. My airplane, less than a year old, was an alien being beside it, glowing against the shades of the forest and the faces of the inhabitants like a marble statue freshly sunken to the bottom of the sea.

From Tikal it was to be an easy trip south to Guatemala City. But we needed fuel, and for that we stopped nearby at Flores. The airport, it turned out, was out of fuel. By the time we had arranged to buy some—just enough—from a private forestry firm it was midafternoon. Impatient, we took off without checking the weather, a cumbersome process those days.