General Navigation
The full EASA ATPL(A) General Navigation syllabus, taught properly: the Earth and its coordinates, the three norths, distances, speeds and the triangle of velocities, dead reckoning, VFR navigation, great circles and rhumb lines, chart projections and plotting, and time — every learning objective explained with the calculations worked step by step.
The foundations everything else stands on: the shape and spin of the Earth, latitude and longitude, the three norths with variation and deviation, distances and speeds, the triangle of velocities, dead reckoning, and the arithmetic of climb and descent.
General navigation is the art of knowing where the aircraft is and how to point it somewhere else, using nothing more exotic than geometry, arithmetic and a clock. This module builds the toolkit: the Earth as navigators model it, the grid of latitude and longitude laid over it, the three norths a direction can be measured from, and the speeds, distances and wind triangles that turn a line on a chart into a heading and a time, on flat legs first and then in the climb and descent that bracket them.
Navigation with the world itself as the aid: which ground features make good checkpoints and when they can be seen, map reading and chart preparation, fixes from visual position lines, terrain read from contours and layer tinting, and what to do when the picture and the plan stop agreeing.
Module 1 built the arithmetic; this module points it out of the window. VFR (visual flight rules) navigation runs the same dead reckoning, but its fixes come from churches, rivers and ridgelines instead of radio aids, so its craft is knowing which features to trust, how to read a chart quickly in a moving cockpit, and how to stay calm and systematic when the ground refuses to match the map.
The two lines an aircraft can follow over a round Earth: the great circle, shortest but ever-changing in direction, and the rhumb line, constant in direction but longer, together with the convergence and conversion-angle arithmetic that connects them.
Between any two places the Earth offers two natural paths. One is the shortest possible, but its direction changes all the way; the other holds one steady direction, but is longer. Every chart and every long-range flight plan is a negotiation between the two, and this module supplies the geometry and the two small formulas that price it.
How a round Earth is pressed onto flat paper, and what each pressing costs: the ICAO requirements, scale and its arithmetic, the polar stereographic and Mercator projections, the Lambert chart the airways are drawn on, and the practical craft of measuring, plotting and fixing on all of them.
No flat chart can tell the whole truth about a sphere: every projection preserves some properties by sacrificing others. This module explains which properties aviation insists on, prices the three classical projections against them, and then puts the winning chart to work with a protractor, a pair of dividers and the radio aids the Radio Navigation course explains.
The navigator's clock: mean solar time and the LMT of a meridian, the arc-to-time arithmetic that ties longitude to UTC, standard and daylight saving time, the date line, and the sunrise, sunset and twilight tables that decide when the day begins and ends.
Every ETA, every log entry and every sunrise table in aviation runs on one shared clock, and this closing module explains where that clock comes from: the Sun, averaged into good behaviour; the meridians, each carrying its own local time; and the conventions, zones and tables that let a crew turn longitude into hours and a date into the minute the light will fail.