The attention paid to the compass heading is probably the most important safety factor to come out of planning via dead reckoning and pilotage as it relates to flying by GPS. Since you'll be expecting wind, you'll factor its anticipated speed and direction into your calculations, and if appropriate, the heading you'll fly will include a wind correction angle. As part of the planning you'll get the winds aloft at select points along your route. This kind of approach also prepares you for the changes that are bound to happen along the way, especially on a longer trip. This puts a general outline of flight times, airports, and the topography along the route in your mind's eye so you'll automatically know if something is going astray. In effect, you've flown the trip in your mind in great detail during the initial planning. Planning every trip as if the GPS won't be along develops a pilotage and dead reckoning mind set. Navigating by pilotage and dead reckoning offers myriad benefits. Here, ground references help to verify the accuracy of your dead reckoning. If you monitor your progress across the ground below, and don't keep your nose pressed to the GPS screen, you're actually navigating with a combination of dead reckoning and pilotage. If there are no major wind changes and the leg isn't too long, you may even hit it on the nose. Even without the corrections, however, by holding the compass heading, you'll come out somewhere in the general neighborhood of where you want to be. If you're lucky, you have some interim information that allows you to adjust your compass heading to correct for wind-sailors used a rock on a rope to gauge drift, but we can call flight service and get the winds aloft along our route. In its purest form, dead reckoning'short for deduced reckoning'involves picking a compass heading and holding it until you reach the next waypoint, while using elapsed time to calculate your position.
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