You can tell you are a redneck pilot: ...If your airport windsock is made from a Purina feedsack ...If you have a NASCAR "3" on the side of your airplane ... If you acknowledge the tower's takeoff clearance with "hey y'all watch this!". There was a whole page of these one- liners passed around the shop last winter but the one that really fiired our imaginations was the one "... If you ever spent a summer evening taxiing around the airport drinking beer and listening to country music on the ADF"
Like any good joke, it shines a sliver of light into one of the dark corners of human psychology, but it is also an inside joke. It offers the subtle suggestion that the ADF, once the mainstay of aeronautical navigation, has been relegated to the status of a toy for the easily amused. It is a revenge that has been sought by every instrument- rated pilot who silently prayed he would never have to do an ADF approach in real weather.
The ADF is an "Automatic Direction Finder", and it is as versatile as it is simple. It replaced the direction- finding loop antenna that had to be manually rotated to determine the airplane's position relative to a radio station. Quite a boon at its inception 60 years ago, it automatically and continuously displayed the direction to a radio station relative to the airplane's nose.
A clever and experienced pilot could take this basic information and maneuver his airplane to a course that represented, say, a 240 degree course from the station. He could then descend on that course, across shifting winds, and find his airport straight ahead as he broke free of the clouds. All this would be done in spite of an orchestra of loud atmospheric noises, caused by everything from lightning bolts to the aurora borealis. The ADF is vintage vacuum- tube technology, and all the visualization and number crunching must be done the old fashioned way.
Most all ADF receivers also tune the adjacent AM broadcast band because it increases their utility. A position fix based on two or three AM broadcast stations is just as accurate as using beacon stations, and the broadcast stations are more numerous and more powerful. My airplane at work has an ADF, mostly as a backup for the VOR and GPS navigation systems. Little was spared in equipping these planes so that they could be flown effectively by just one pilot.
My airplane doesn't have muzak though. Probably on purpose, it doesn't even have a cigarette lighter that a CD player could plug into. One morning last week I was grinding through a dark morning's headwind, 500 HP worth of jet fuel producing a groundspeed of 87 knots, when as a last resort I started exploring the entertainment possibilities of the ADF. Lordy, I certainly had the time for it.
Nearing Wilkes- Barre I discovered Connie Francis singing "Among My Souvenirs" on "Oldies 1400" It was more than just an old song though, it had the aura and authenticity of actually being there again. The sound was vintage AM radio at its marvelous worst. It harked back to the days when radios (and heaters) were listed as options when buying a new car. Nobody cared about the limited fidelity and the boundless array of background noises because nothing better was available. There were no CDs, cassettes, or even any sort of FM. Cool dudes had cars with two tinny speakers instead of just one tinny speaker.
For half an hour I celebrated a vintage music festival, listening to old songs as they were listened to when they were new. The signal strength ebbed and flowed like ocean tides, and fluttered in short choppy waves. Sometimes other, more distant, stations would emerge from the currents of natural and man made background noises. Somewhere through the years I had forgotten that the fickle nature of nighttime AM radio was as much a part of the music as the singer or the band.
I have always said that airplanes can take you many places, and this morning was no exception. As I hung in an empty sky, almost motionless between the stars and the yard lights, I was crusin' the summer nights of 1963. Just like it was yesterday, I could hear WKBW's Rock n' Roll stumbling and stuttering from the speaker of a car radio, or maybe just from a tabletop radio we had set in an open porch window.