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Flight Planning Software

zipmartin

Never been better
pilot
Contributor
For real. When I started civilian flight training just a hair under 20 years ago, we had no GPS approaches (and specific to our aircraft, no GPS at all), still shot NDBs as a requirement for the instrument practical, and our fanciest airplane had a VOR/DME based RNAV computer. Having an HSI was a game changer, especially with dual VORs. That wasn't really that long ago, but it seems like a different world, which I have mostly forgotten. You're right though, there was a real explosion of capabilities with proliferation of GPS RNAV approaches and tablets, all of which seems to have happened in the last decade or so. No joke, my first GPS approach ever, was sometime around 2017, shortly after we got RNAV in the F/A-18.
Reading this thread got me to reminiscing........summer of '73, my college roommate and I leaving the EAA Fly In at Oshkosh, headed back to Champaign, IL in our boss's C-170 with a coffee-grinder radio and a worthless ADF, scud-running at 200' AGL southbound on the right side of US-51 between Janesville, WI and Bloomington, IL (now I-90 & I-39), taking turns at the controls while the other guy was looking for towers depicted on the sectional chart, seeing northbound planes on the opposite side of the road, having to orbit 10 miles west of KCMI waiting for a special VFR clearance into the control zone/ATA. Then in the Navy, flying A-4's and A-7's, in base ops at an AF base, flight planning by taking our black, Property of U.S. Government, 200nm ball point pen, and flipping it end to end along the depicted airways on the wall chart, saying "Yeah, we can make it" while our comrades in arms from the "other" service with their whiz wheels smoking in their hands, stood watching in disbelief. It was such a simple time back then.
 
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