The Reddit r/flying thread raises a practical training question that sits at the intersection of traditional flight planning pedagogy and the modern data environment pilots now operate in: how granular should wind sampling and interpolation be when building a paper navlog, and does that granularity need to scale as a pilot progresses from PPL to CPL and beyond. The original poster notes that in 2026, winds aloft data is available at a resolution far exceeding what ground school checkride prep typically teaches—aviationweather.gov and other tools can produce wind barbs every few miles rather than the traditional handful of reporting stations pilots were taught to interpolate between. The question is whether coarse interpolation between origin and destination remains pedagogically sufficient for Private Pilot training, or whether building habits of finer-grained sampling now pays dividends once the ACS standards tighten for Commercial cross-country planning.
This matters to working pilots because navlog construction, however anachronistic it may seem in an era of EFBs and integrated flight planning software, is fundamentally about teaching situational awareness of how wind shifts along a route affect groundspeed, fuel burn, ETA, and diversion decision-making. A CFI's choice to teach two-point interpolation versus multi-segment sampling isn't just an academic exercise—it shapes how a student pilot mentally models wind behavior before they ever touch a tool like ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, or an FMS-driven wind correction display. Pilots who only ever learn to average wind between two distant points can be caught off guard by localized wind shear, mountain wave effects, or frontal boundaries that a denser sampling grid would have flagged. For instrument and commercial training specifically, the ACS explicitly expects tighter tolerances on ETE and fuel calculations, which in practice forces students to either sample more waypoints or lean more heavily on automated tools—raising the question of whether manual granular interpolation is a skill worth cultivating for its own sake, similar to why dead reckoning and pilotage remain checkride requirements despite GPS ubiquity.
The broader trend here echoes a recurring tension in flight training: the gap between the increasing power of automation and data availability versus the FAA's continued emphasis on foundational manual skills as a hedge against system failure or automation complacency. Just as VOR navigation, ADF tracking, and manual weight-and-balance calculations persist in the curriculum despite GPS and integrated EFB tools rendering them largely obsolete in daily operations, wind aloft interpolation by hand is defended by many CFIs as a way to internalize wind triangle mechanics rather than treat groundspeed and heading corrections as a black box output. This is directly relevant to airline and Part 135 operators too—dispatchers and pilots reviewing flight-planned winds still need to sanity-check computer-generated numbers against known meteorological patterns, particularly during jet stream season or when planning around convective weather, and that skill is built during primary training long before anyone touches a dispatch release or FMS wind uplink.
For instructors and DPEs, the thread underscores an ongoing curriculum question: should ground schools update their navlog exercises to reflect the reality of easily accessible high-resolution wind data, or does the pedagogical value lie precisely in the friction of sparse-data interpolation, forcing students to reason about wind gradients rather than simply reading them off a dense grid? The "just use ForeFlight" pushback anticipated in the post reflects a broader cultural debate in aviation training about how much manual skill-building is necessary insurance against technology failure versus how much is legacy tradition that no longer matches operational reality. As avionics and flight-planning tools continue to improve in resolution and accessibility, this same debate will likely resurface around other traditionally manual planning tasks, making it a useful bellwether for how flight training curricula evolve to balance foundational skill retention with modern operational relevance.