Pilotage, Dead Reckoning and Time-Speed-Distance

Pilotage is simply navigating by what you can see: you match rivers, roads, railroads, towns, and lakes on the ground against the same features drawn on your sectional chart. It works best low and in good visibility. Dead reckoning is the arithmetic counterpart: starting from a known point, you use a planned true course, the forecast wind, and your true airspeed to compute a heading, a groundspeed, and the time and fuel for each leg. The two methods reinforce each other — dead reckoning tells you where and when to expect the next landmark, and pilotage confirms you are where the math says. All of this rests on the time-speed-distance relationship: distance equals speed times time. Knowing your groundspeed, you divide leg distance by groundspeed to get leg time, and multiply time by the fuel burn rate to get fuel required, which is how every ETA and reserve check is made.