Dead Reckoning

Not that it’s of interest to anyone but me and a few other nerds, but in my pre-GPS flying days, before embarking on a long flight we had to draw a lot of lines on actual paper aeronautical charts (not maps) using a lot of calculations, between lots of identifiable landmarks or “fixes” to keep us on course. Nowadays it's just keep the little cartoon airplane on the big pink line on the iPad. No one can say exactly why, but the former is called “dead reckoning”. It’s thought that the “dead” in dead reckoning comes from either “deduced”…or that if you don’t do it that’s how you’ll wind up.

This is because being even just a little off course on a 300 nautical mile trip can leave you hopelessly lost and produce some potentially disastrous results (not that this has ever happened to me).

In the Epistle reading for this Sunday, The First Sunday of Advent, St. Paul carries this kind of urgency for not getting off course, even just a little.

See you Sunday.

Steve+