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Chapter 7
Navigation, Autopilots, and Flying on
Instruments
People often call customer support asking about some of the more advanced things that pilots
do in the real world—how to navigate, use an autopilot, or fly on instruments. This chapter will
cover these areas in a fair amount of detail, but we recommend that, if you are really serious about
mastering these facets of aviation, you head down to a local general aviation airport and hire a
CFI (Certified Flight Instructor) for an hour or two. If you have a laptop, by all means bring it
along and have the instructor detail these things in practice. There is much more to review here
than this manual could ever cover, so a quick search for information on the Internet will also be of
assistance.
7.1 Navigating
Navigating over the Earth’s surface is as easy as knowing where your aircraft is and how to get
to where you want to go. This isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. Imagine that you’re flying IMC
(Instrument Meteorological Conditions—that is, in the clouds). You have no reference to the ground
and are flying over St. Louis in the middle of an overcast layer. As you might guess, this looks pretty
much identical to the view you would have flying over Moscow on instruments. The only way to
know that you’re over St. Louis and not over Moscow is to be able to navigate. Navigation is the
art of being able to tell where your aircraft is and how to make it go where you’d like.
7.1.1 Air Navigation History
For the first 30 years or so the best pilots could do was to fly around using what is known as
dead reckoning—that is, by confirming their position on a map as they flew, then looking ahead on
the map to see when they should be crossing some known landmark, like a road, railroad, town, or
lake. Then, the pilots periodically compared their progress over the real ground with the anticipated
progress over the map to see how things were going. This really is as simple as it sounds. The biggest
trick is to always know where you are and what to be looking for next.
Dead reckoning isn’t too difficult to get down. Shortly after college, Austin Meyer (the author of
X-Plane) and Randy Witt once piloted a Cessna 172 from Kansas City to Chicago after their second
(of two) navigation radios gave up and died in mid-flight. Clearly this is not a typical experience in
the aviation world, but it’s a reminder that a pilot always needs to be thinking ahead and preparing
for contingencies. That particular aircraft was a well-used rental and NAV 1 was dead from the
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