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 from Tikal to Guatemala City becomes critically lost after a hasty departure from Flores without checking weather, finding themselves without functional navigation over a vast, featureless forest.
Facing imminent darkness and dwindling fuel, the pilot relies on rudimentary dead reckoning and a sparse road map to calculate a heading back to Flores.
Despite the minimal information, the calculated heading leads them precisely to Lake Peten Itza and Flores, allowing for a safe return.
The experience prompts the pilot to question whether extensive dead reckoning practice cultivates an unconscious, highly accurate navigational intuition, a skill often eclipsed by modern technology.

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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.