Gene Hudson, the man with, as my old Grandma would say, more ratings than, "Carter has Liver Pills", spoke to a group of over forty pilots and students at the September PVPA meeting. The subject of Gene's talk was, "VOR for Dummies".

He worked up to the subject with a brief history of radio navigation. If you had been flying the mail in the early days of aviation, you would have flown from bonfire to bonfire. The hills those fires were located on became sites for radio beacons and later today's VOR/VORTAC/VOR-DME. Flying is a stressful activity and Gene says there is really no reason to complicate things by trying to do higher math at the same time, (anything more complex than putting together two single-digit numbers is higher math when flying) so he showed us a simple method of finding the answer when the tower asks where you are. After you have tuned in and identified the nearest VOR, take a look at the LOC needle and the flag. The needle will fill the left or right half of the instrument face and the flag will fill either the top or bottom. You can report you are somewhere in the empty sector. Now use the OBS to turn the empty sector to the top of the card and stop when the needle centers. Now, all you have to do is fly the course to the VOR. Gene gave us a simple method of flying an intercept angle to get back on course. You could count the dots and if you know your distance from the VOR, you could do the math and figure a precise intercept course. But you don't have a DME and after all we want to keep it simple. So just fly a 45-degree course into that empty sector and wait for the needle to come in.

He had much more to share, but you will have to visit his web site to find out about Gene, his books and his school.