The old DF steer came onto my radar today (if you’ll excuse the irony), so not having flown for far too many years I thought I’d look it up, just out of curiosity. Seems they are being or have been decommissioned in a lot of places.
But what really struck me in the few discussions I read about them was the incredibly narrow view of some of the pilots discussing them. Sure, as we all know, the USA is the centre of the universe in many ways, not the least of which is aviation, but the ability to fly is supposed to broaden your outlook (and particularly your world view), especially if you can talk about zipping a couple of hundred nautical miles away (or over to the next continent, depending on your equipment!) to have lunch and be back in time for dinner. And yet, here were all these pilots (most of them US-based) talking about DF steers and radar coverage as if the former are no longer available anywhere on the planet, and the latter covers every square centimetre of the planet.
Weird.