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GPS and safety.

So I had a PS fitted. It was marvellous. I’d set it up for a flight from Finley to Tocumwal even though it was only 10 miles and I could see the destination immediately on becoming airborne. It was most useful for long flights and I had the opinion it would contribute to safely as one could pay attention to flying and not checking maps or messing with slide rules. We all agreed it was novel. But some of us didn’t know when to leave it alone.
A very experienced fellow fiddled with it after spreading a load of fertilizer, he was enroute back to the strip for his next load. With his eyes on the dash and not where he was going he flew into a pine plantation. He pulled out but not okay, the leading edges were flattened so badly engineers and other pilots expressed surprise the aeroplane could still fly. Prop strike also necessitated a costly engine rebuild as well. The fellow had passed 30k hours flying time!
Another experienced agricultural pilot fiddled with his GPS on takeoff and ran off the airstrip badly damaging his aeroplane. He too had sufficient experience to have known better.
An airline pilot, closely related to me, started to set the GPS immediately on becoming airborne and not watching what he should have been watching stalled it into the ground. The Flying Doctor retrieved the whole four of them and flew them to hospital.
I would well expect there are many more. Remember a few stories back I said I didn’t like our new motorcar because the electronic dash took too much attention and most of the information and directions it gave was trivia? One must even look at the steering wheel to locate and press the cruise control. To take ones eyes off the road and other traffic increases risk and that’s what I don’t like about it.

The next story is about GPS tracking in agricultural aeroplanes.