September October 2017

13 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org OrYSN I graduated with a BA in Business Administration —Prelaw from Michigan State in 2008. For those who don’t remember, 2008 was a bad year to go to law school. I started working at a beer distributor doing logistics and considering my options. I had always said that if I didn’t have a career or a girl keeping me at home, I’d join the Navy. In 2009, I went to Officer Candidate School and was commissioned the next year as a Student Naval Flight Officer. In Pensacola, I learned about commercial and tactical navigation to know where I was and hit a target on time using radio instru- ments, look-down radar, and visual means. Commercial aircraft navigate terrestrially using radio beacons. VHF Omnidirectional Range (VOR) stations dot the country and transmit a signal to aircraft with radial and distance information. A horizontal situation indicator displays gyro- stabilized compass information with “needles” pointing to selected VOR stations. Most aircraft typ- ically have two needles. If you want to know where your aircraft is, you’re “on the tail of the needle:” since it points towards the station, the other end of the arrow is your position. Navigating “point to point” can be done with vector addition. You can use your needles to scale and interpolate a way to get to a destination directly. A good navigator can use these methods to obtain a correct posi- tion within a quarter of a mile. Aircraft have a backup compass, a “whiskey ball,” that indicates magnetic north. All instrument nav- igation is based on magnetic north, too. Runways are named for the heading you fly to take off or land on them, to the nearest 10 degrees. While I was in Pensacola, the main runways were 07/25, so you flew 070 (or 250 if the wind was blowing in the other direction) to take off and land. Every safe flyer orients their gyrocompass on the run- way to the published heading before they take off. Since magnetic declination changes over time, so do the names of runways. “Old timers” around town could regale a young flyer with tales about how, back in their day, the runway was called 06. All that sounds pretty familiar, right? The next part will too—everybody just uses GPS supported by inertial navigation now. For those who don’t remember, 2011 was a bad year to be in the military. We left Iraq, and the Navy decided it had too many officers. I was separated from Active Duty in March of 2012, and followed a girl to Oregon, going back to work at another beer distributor and taking interviews. I have been a Jeopardy fan my entire life, and fol- lowed Ken Jennings’s record-breaking run in the summer of 2004. After the show, he began his sec- ond career as an author. In late 2011, he released a book called “Maphead” about geography nerds like me (considering this periodical’s readership, maybe I’ll say “us.”) There was a very inspiring chapter in there about Land Surveying, and I be- gan exploring what it would take to start in that field. Fortunately, I was already in the same state as the Oregon Institute of Technology and its Land Surveying program. I emailedMasonMarker out of nowhere to ask about the program and the pros- pects of its graduates, visited the school, applied, and began classes all within a month. And that is how I got in to Surveying. Leo Litowich is a Land Survey Intern at Multi/Tech Engineer- ing in Salem. He is eligible for licensure in April of 2020. Leo (right) in front of his Primary trainer Horizontal situation indicator