Visual Navigation
Pilots follow rivers, roads, railway lines and other identifiable land features. Visual navigation is mainly used by light aircraft pilots. Note on Map 2 the yellow line represents where the pilot wishes to fly. Note roads, railway lines and rivers.
Locations on our planet are broken down into North/South and East/West for use in navigating planes and ships. The Equator is well known as the centre latitude, by convention zero meridian of longitude passes through Greenwich, London, UK. Under the menu item "Time and Seasons" (Enviroment Menu) you can learn about GMT..... Greenwich Mean Time. It is vital to navigating.
Instrument (Airline) Navigation
Airline pilots use a combination of radio beacons and onboard navigation equipment such as IRS, INS or GPS. The IRS (Inertial Reference System) or INS (Inertial Navigation System) are spin-offs from the Space industry using accelerometers or laser gyros to seek movement. GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) use satellites in orbit to track position.
After the parked position is loaded the route to be taken needs to be loaded with positions enroute entered in a similar manner to the co-ordinates shown for Honolulu. These enroute positions can be loaded manually, via a card system, via a computer database retrieval system or, on my plane, via a satellite datalink to my company.
The small section of an aircraft navigation chart is shown here for an area near Chicago, USA. The long black lines indicate the airways that pilots fly, not unlike a car highway system. The navigational aids shown are shown in boxes such as Northbrook in the top left. The radio frequency of the aid is displayed along with the morse code identification and the position of the aid. The tracks are shown in degrees relative to North. The track out of Northbrook 092 degrees would take you to Onbar.