This picture was taken 1.5 miles from our house at Sheep Mountain, while flying down the Glenn Highway. My Garmin 296 GPS is hardly essential in this location but I still consider it worth it’s weight in gold. I did not learn to fly with a GPS at flight school, and I am glad I didn’t because it is crucial to be absolutely proficient with a sectional (map). My flight school made us navigate from Eastern Tennessee to California and back twice using only a sectional and a clock. It’s funny that map navigation is even note-worthy considering GPS’s have only been around a few years. I am sure that pilotage and dead reckoning will become a lost art. There was a time not long ago when a clock and an incomplete map were all that was available.
I struggled horribly with navigation at school, but with the persistence of some great instructors they beat it through my thick skull. I always carry a sectional with me because my GPS has failed on a couple of occasions. When I am headed to an unfamiliar area I run with two GPS’s. One is on system power and the other is on AA batteries. I really appreciate redundancy with certain aspects of flight and two GPS’s is cheap peace of mind in unfamiliar territory when the weather is bad and I am 2 hours from nowhere.