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My dad was a navigator on a B-17. He'd tell me that he had to scrape the frost off of the dome with his fingernails so he could get a fix on a star while flying across the Atlantic. Crossing the Atlantic at the time was at the limit of the B-17's range, so messing up the navigation means you disappeared. Nobody dreamed of GPS back then :-)

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Some operational C-130s still have a little sextant port for shooting a star but only a few of the old guys would still even know how it works.

The GPS most of them use is almost as old, a $20 Garmin handheld could navigate circles around it.

> a $20 Garmin handheld could navigate circles around it

Probably not, as it will refuse to work at both the altitude and speed of an airplane ;-)

EDIT: I stand corrected. Neither the speed nor the altitude will be a problem.

The GPS altitude limit is 18km which is 60,000ft. Normal cruising altitude is 35,000ft.

It's also trivial to obtain unrestricted GPS devices.

> Probably not, as it will refuse to work at both the altitude and speed of an airplane ;-)

Well sub in the garmin with one of the other low cost consumer units that work at those altitude and speeds then!

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