I prefer using a computer or a cell phone, as an aid..........instead of tapping out Morse code for the normal course of conversation.
You have to learn to talk before you can use a cell phone (unless you think texting the person next to you is a good way to communicate).
In today's world, do we really want to teach students to fly.....just by the basics that you've listed above?
You keep throwing in additional restrictions beyond what we've said. But yes, I do want to teach them to fly just by the basics I've listed before I teach them how to use the systems that automate much of the work. The reason is in the Law of Primacy -- if things go sour, I want them to revert to the fundamentals, and if they don't learn those first, they won't be able to use them in time of crisis. Also, I've seen more than one person punch a bunch of numbers into a computer and then take whatever comes out without any recognition of the absurdity of the result caused by an entry error.
There was a great story years ago in an engineering journal about a group of young engineers who presented their boss with a construction plan for a manufacturing building that included a drainage pond big enough to drop in the Empire State Building without making a ripple. The facts that 90% of the cost of the project was the drainage pond instead of a more typical 5%, and that the whole project cost was about 10 times that for a typical project of that size, didn't faze them -- the numbers came out of the computer, so they must be right. The boss, having grown up with a slide rule, knew how to come up with rough estimates based on experience, and instantly recognized both the fact that there was a major error, and where the error lay.
Likewise, I've seen pilots head north when they should be heading west simply because they made an entry error in their GPS, or flew past a turnpoint without concern when the GPS gave them a 20-minute leg to a point 5 miles away. In the low-level fighters I flew for 15 years, we had intertial, digital nav computers, nav radars, doppler nav, and a bunch of other stuff, but at the end of the day, it was all about basic DR -- time, heading, speed, and distance. If we knew the next leg was supposed to be a right turn heading 355 for 4 minutes and 25 seconds, we did not follow the nav system if it said to turn left to west for 10 minutes.
Is there a problem with creating more direct routing, rather than hop scotching between VORs, or triangulating which requires more eye time in the cockpit, instead of scanning the sky ahead?
Many times, you don't have that choice. And I've seen plenty of occasions where my GPS says "GPS NAV LOST USE ALTERNATE NAV SYSTEMS." If you can't revert to raw VOR when that happens, and not hit anything while you're refiguring, you aren't safe to fly.
If it all goes to ****, won't synthetic vision beat interpreting dials, while nothing but shades of gray or black are seen out the windscreen?
If it all goes south, you may not have that SVT. Now what?
Why not just teach all of this at the beginning, instead of creating the illusion that it's cheating or an unnecessary aid.
Again, you're assuming facts not in evidence. I certainly never said it was cheating, although I will say it is certainly not essential to safe flying. I personally flew thousands of hours in light planes safely before SVT, EVS, GPS, and all that other alphabet soup were invented. As for why we teach the basics first, it's all about the Law of Primacy -- you have to learn the most important stuff first if the trainee is going to remember it later in time of need.
One last question in my mind about you -- just how many folks have you prepared for PP and IR practical tests in the last 15 years that all this gear has been invented? Are you even a CFI?
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