www.PSFmagazine.com | September-October 2019 | 43 42 | September-October 2019 | Powered Sport Flying Hating on the E6B The last time I went to the aviation show aero in Friedrichshafen, Germany, I got there a day or two ahead of time to get over the jet lag. My flight was into Munich. Talk about a wonderful city in which to get over jet lag! Years ago when I visited Munich for the first time, I went to attend Oktoberfest. Now, a tiny bit more mature (and arriving exactly six months too late or too early to go to Oktoberfest) I visited Munich’s Deutsches Museum. It is the world’s largest museum of science and technology, with about 28,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields of science and technology. One of the objects displayed behind the glass, like it was something precious, was my old Apple Macintosh Plus. Oh, my. Was it really that long ago? I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that thirty-year-old computers are officially considered technological relics like whale oil lanterns. Moreover, most kids today have never seen a slide rule and probably couldn’t identify one if you showed it to them. And yes, I know how to use one, having come of age when only the wealthier kids in class could afford the pricey $24.95 Texas Instruments calculators with the red led digital numbers. The rest of us were forced to learn how to use slide rules. I don’t remember whether it was lawn mowing money or Christmas that delivered to me my first electronic calculator, but I can promise you that once I got it, the slide rule was retired. I went on to study mechanical engineering at a top 20 ranked university. And I can report to you that no one there insisted that anyone prove that they could master a slide rule in order to be a ‘real’ engineer. In fact, we were struggling to master programs we were writing using computer punch cards that we would turn into the university Computer Center for processing. (My goodness. Don’t tell the folks at the Deutsches Museum or they may put me behind a glass case!) The point is that engineers and proper technical people strive to use the best tool to get the job done. The slide rule is a primitive tool with limited accuracy and was retired as soon as the digital tools became available and affordable. Which brings me to the E6B flight computer, which is nothing but a kind of circular slide rule. This thing was developed by the Navy in the late 1930s. Yes, over eighty years ago. I suspect that the E6B, the abacus, and human fingers are the only analog calculating devices still in wide use today. The E6B is not impossible to learn to use, but it is an unnecessary pain in the butt. Exactly what is the fixation that some flight instructors have with insisting that their student pilots master this arcane piece of computing machinery? The faa doesn’t require it. Electronic flight computers are just fine (and save time) when students take faa knowledge tests. There are free apps for your smart phone that will do the same calculations for you after you become a pilot. And best of all, there are downloadable and on-line flight planning programs that will do all the calculations and lay things out in beautiful color on your iPad. The reality is that student pilots beginning flight training already only have a mere one out of five chance of completing flight training and getting their certificates as it is. Why introduce yet another bit of hazing into the process? We need to make things easier for young pilots, not more difficult. So flight instructors: for your students’ sake and for the sake of growing the number of pilots in the world, please retire your E6B’s. It will be OK. Really. It is decades past time where the only place someone should be able to see a real E6B is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The E6B Air Navigation Computer. Image courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum. (Where this belongs.)
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