Recently a friend shared a newspaper article regarding a recent speed record set by the pilot of a single-engine piston aircraft on a flight between Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska. What caught our attention was the author’s note that the pilot “navigated only by sight, without using instruments, following maps and ground landmarks.’’ This practice is known as pilotage, something VFR pilots have been doing since the beginning days of aviation.
I was confused as to why the author would mention the lack of GPS use—then it occurred to me that we live in the age of the GPS. It is on our phones, in our cars—and many of our airplanes—so choosing to navigate by pilotage may seem to some pilots as quaint as listening to a vinyl record.
