I had a good look at this extraordinary plane, the A350 (the real airplane), inspired by this IniBuilds video, because, coincidentally, I finished today several readings evoking French aviation pioneers (Jean Mermoz, Saint-Exupery, Guillaumet, etc), written by those who worked, flew, met with them, Joseph Kessel among others.

Then I paused, and thought: We owe so much to these men who risked - and often lost - their lives for what we take today as a given!

How many people know that these pilots flew before 1930 on airplanes made of wood and fabric, with no cockpit, but an open space with no protection from rain, winds and snow, no other instruments than a watch, a compass, an altimeter, an anemometer (Badin invented it in 1911), during day time first, and soon at night, in what we now call IMC, sometimes as low as 200 feet below a CB cell with heavy precipitations and turbulences, above the sea, or the desert, to deliver... letters on time!

Which pilot, today, with a sane mind, would take off in rain and overcast (IMC) with the instrumentation listed above and road maps to navigate, no VOR, no ADF, no GPS, no radio, on a plane equipped with an unreliable engine - as they were then - putting the probability of an engine failure above 50%?... 

When you now look at the sleek and elegant silhouette of the A350, its tons of instruments, computer screens, radios, with an endurance of 16 hours to cover half the globe, compared with 16 hours to cross the South Atlantic ocean between Dakar and Natal on the Couzinet "Arc en Ciel" (Rainbow), how many passengers (and even pilots) know, or can imagine, what these pioneers did?

How many of these passengers and pilots realise that, back then (1930), pilots were forced to cross the Andes with planes that did not have the capability to climb above the highest peaks, and then had to navigate between summits, amidst clouds with nasty cold weather, winds and snow in an open cockpit and no oxygen at 14'000 feet? Alone!

I have the uncomfortable feeling that we are so arrogant today with these electronic machines, that all the past heavy human sacrifices are forgotten for ever, less than a century later.

We pretend to fly (I mean this as a former real world pilot myself not as desktop "flyer") when in fact we barely manage an assemblage of various brilliant technologies, but where is the real flying experience in all this?

A few years ago an Air France crew - coincidentally between Rio and Paris the very route that Mermoz developed in early 1932 - lost control of their A330 at night in the Pot-au-noir on the South Atlantic crossing, because their cockpit bells and whistles were not functioning as they should have. Isn't that the demonstration that the real art of piloting is lost on those superb machines?

To such a point that Airbus is hard at work on a cockpit without pilots. What are your thoughts, do you know your country aviation pioneers, how are they celebrated or remembered if at all? What are your views on today's aviation piloting skills?

Edited February 9, 20251 yr by Bernard Ducret

Thanks for this post. I enjoyed reading it -you have captured the very essence of what appeals to me in flying -even if I am only an armchair pilot!

I think it goes both ways. The safety compared to the traffic is unparralled.  The accident with ureleliable airspeed is a learning which now is trained and also introduced to abnormal procedures but we learn along.

The magenta pilots is a whole new outcome relativ to the amount of planes. New safety procedures which hardly existed is now a priority maybe rather than old school flying for sure.

Same goes for cars in the future i would guess.

Michael Moe

2 hours ago, Bernard Ducret said:

where is the real flying experience in all this?

This is why I love sim flying in primitive aircraft in primitive conditions. I'm challenging myself to see if I could do even a part of what these real aviation pioneers did.

After many thousands of hours flying pure dead reckoning, without GPS or autopilot (or time compression), and with only vague notions of winds aloft, I've discovered many things.

You fly a compass heading for a specified time and look for a specific terrain feature, then turn to a new heading and fly a new time to a new feature, repeat until destination. As long as your initial heading is accurate, you'll almost always hit your target. Accurate charts help. 🙂 In the absence of charts you have instructions from people who have already made the flight.

There are also methods to make sure you get where you are going even if you end up off course, and ways to find your way if you get lost.

Even Lindbergh hit the coast about where he expected, even when he messed up his navigation during the flight. He fell asleep and circled for a while, and he stopped his planned turning to follow a great circle route for a few hours. He still got where he was going. 

I'm not going to claim it's easy, but it's not nearly as hard as you might think if you've never done it, at least in the sim. Lindbergh thought he was lucky. I'm saying it was easier than he thought it would be.

As a bonus, if you never use the GPS, it's possible to land at the wrong airport. 😄 An analysis after landing usually shows where you went wrong.

Try it, you'll like it. I recommend the A2A Piper J3 Cub. It has everything you need, just avoid using the moving map.

Hook

 

I gotta tell this one.

There was only once in many thousands of waypoints where I totally missed the mark. This was shortly after I started using dead reckoning almost exclusively for navigation.

I was in the abovementioned J3 Cub, flying a calculated heading, and looking for a small square town as my waypoint. After flying the calculated time the town was nowhere to be found. Yeah, I panicked and checked the A2A Cub's in game map and found I was pretty far south of the town. Eventually I realized that while my calculated heading was correct, I'd misread the compass and was 10 degrees off what I thought I was flying.

I wonder if this is what happened to Amelia Earhart. 

I recommend flying legs of 10 minutes or less. It's a rule of thumb that a competent pilot will be within 10% off from his intended destination calculated as a percentage of his distance flown.  In other words, if a leg is 10 miles, you should be within 1 mile of your target.

If you are flying the 2090 nautical miles from San Francisco to Honolulu, you should be within 209 nautical miles of Honolulu, within range of the VORs on each end of the island chain. Actually, the last time I made that flight in the A2A Constellation, I actually arrived at the correct island! 😄 I'm gonna call that one luck. All other flights I picked up one of the VORs. This flight requires flying the correct heading on departure (I believe it's 252 degrees true, 239 degrees mag currently) and turning 2 degrees south every hour to fly a great circle route.

Hook

23 hours ago, Bernard Ducret said:

To such a point that Airbus is hard at work on a cockpit without pilots.

Perhaps by then they will be flying a load of "virtual passengers," eh?

On 2/9/2025 at 10:00 AM, Bernard Ducret said:

How many of these passengers and pilots realise that, back then (1930), pilots were forced to cross the Andes with planes that did not have the capability to climb above the highest peaks, and then had to navigate between summits, amidst clouds with nasty cold weather, winds and snow in an open cockpit and no oxygen at 14'000 feet? Alone!

Like in the movie “Night Flight”