Start with basic pilotage. The most basic form of navigation is called pilotage. This involves looking outside your aircraft onto the ground below and around and identifying distinguishable landmarks and then comparing those surroundings to your map. For example, you could find two parallel bridges on a river that ran east to west just a few miles south of a small town. Locate this area on your map and you now have what is called situational awareness.
Get more specific with ded reckoning. “Ded,” commonly misspelled as “dead,” is short for deduced reckoning and refers to pilots using time, speed and distance calculations to determine an aircraft's position. With two of any of the three variables, time, speed or distance, you can find the other two. For example, your ground speed is 100 kts, and the distance to destination airport is 10 miles, you can now calculate the time it will take to reach your destination. These calculations can be made simple by using a hand held electronic or manual flight computer known as an E6B.
Use your resources: ground based navigational aids. In addition to these basic forms of navigation, you can also use the many ground based navaids to help you get a more precise position. Very high omni directional range stations (VORs) send out a radio signal on a specified frequency and are labeled on all aeronautical charts. Non directional radio beacons (NDBs) are also ground stations that broadcast a signal on a specified frequency. NDBs tend to be more prone to errors, less reliable and are currently being phased out of the aviation system.
Rely on your cockpit instruments. Each aircraft cockpit has several instruments that are used to communicate with these ground based navaids. You use them by tuning in the appropriate frequency found on a chart and then twisting a needle on your instrument face to show you where the station is relative to your aircraft’s position.
Use current technology: GPS.A GPS or global positioning system can be a great tool for pilots to increase situational awareness. Newer models of aviation GPSs have colorful moving maps that depict the ground below you and also include airspace boundaries, airports and ground based navaids. Most of these determine your position automatically upon initialization and require little pilot input.
