E6B

Yeah, man.

So E6Bs don't have to spin the wheel anymore.

I don't want to do it.

I

There was no global positioning system.

Navigation on a long overwater route meant dead reckoning, pilotage, and working an E6B flight computer by hand.

Every mile you covered alone was a mile you could not hand off to someone else, could not sleep through, could not lose focus for Post had an answer for that.

It was a device called the Sperry Gyropilot.

Mitchell worked out the entire flight plan by hand.

A pencil, a chart, an E6B flight computer, and the knowledge that he had no room for error at any point along the route.

He calculated the precise airspeed that would give his formation the range to complete the mission, stay in the fight, and get home.

177 knots indicated.

Different sides of the same history, and decades later, men old enough to be grandfathers, finding out what the other one saw, after the war, Major Mitchell's navigation was formally analyzed by Army Air Forces officers who understood precisely what precision dead reckoning looked like.

435 miles at 200 feet above open ocean, no external references, navigating entirely by computed airspeed, and elapsed time, 16 aircraft in formation.

He arrived at the intercept point within 60 seconds of the time he had worked out the previous evening with a pencil and an E6B.

Some historians call it the most precisely executed long-range air intercept of the entire Second World War.

So yeah, parttimepilot.com for that, or you can try out the free app.

It also has the E6B calculator on it.

Would you consider flying with an independent CFI? Absolutely.

If, again, all the things we talked about, and again, that free PDF that we're gonna send you, it has the questions to look for and ask, and ultimately take a discovery flight with that independent CFI.

Um, so, uh, this is way before ForeFlight.

This is paper charts and an E6B and a plotter.

So, um, I'm flying the airplane, and in a different situation, if, uh, this was a primary student, you know, and I was the instructor, probably would've done a different thing.

But, um, the instructor made the decision to do the emergency planning and to allow me to continue to operate the airplane, which in hindsight, if I were in his seat, I would've done the same thing.