Doing the Maths

“As soon as you pass your PPL, you’ll never use it again!”

To what piece of flight bag equipment is this oft-uttered statement by instructors referring?

If you guessed flight computer–colloquially known as the whizz wheel–then top of the class for you. The humble old whizz wheel may be one of the few analogue pieces of equipment left in flight training. For an ever-increasing number of pilots, our cockpits, charts, maps– even our watches–are smart-based.

However, as a non-digital piece of hardware, the whizz wheel still very much a useable item for students pre-PPL as well as for those studying for CPL nav and IREX (and in many cases before the flight tests, depending on the modernity of the instructor). As CASA does not allow iPads or programmable electronic equipment into exams, the whizz wheel must be grappled with by every student at the navigation stage of flight training, before being discarded (by most, but certainly not by all) as soon as the ink