Montreal is the second largest island in the Saint Lawrence River, which itself is fairly easy to find. I doubt I’d have a problem.
Yes, I have a really big white rock in my yard.
I think I could do it pretty easily. All I’d have to do is find the Mississippi River and track it up north to Minnesota. Then it’s just a matter of spotting the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. If I could find a landmark like the Metrodome or the State Capitol, I’d be home free.
Same as for RickJay I can take advantage of the shape of lake Ontario to find Hamilton, then just follow the 403 up the escarpment, turn off over the cemetary, and just basically land there and walk home.
At least until I move.
Though Montreal is pretty identifiable too, and it has a mountain and some large parks and highways that ought to be pretty easy to use to find wherever I’ll live when I get there. Or I can just stop downtown and take the Metro or something!
How to get home:
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Find San Francisco Bay
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From there, find Sacramento River, and follow it.
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Find McClellan, and land at it.
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Take a bus to get home.
If given instruction as to how to fly the spacecraft, I could do it.
kanicbird
I would agree, re-entry aircraft are not that stable in flight. I could probably control/crash it in an area say the size of the USA, but pin pointing my house or town or state with no instruments and no outside assistance impossible. Now a modern jet I could get on a hi-way near the house, but without instruments it would be very very difficult. (Airspeed, AOA, and Artificial Horizon are instruments; flaps, landing gear, and speed brake indicators are usually dummy lights associated with instruments. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it would be: The Best Divot Ever!!
You’re missing kanicbird’s point- it takes some serious mathematical calculation and timing to re-enter, because space ships as we know them today don’t have enough fuel to actually thrust as they’re coming down. So we wind up with a situation where you begin your descent hours ahead, and while you’re still on the other side of the planet.
But, to answer the spirit of the OP, if not the technical letter, yes- I’d just aim for Crater Lake, then move south a little.
Like a lot of others in the thread, I live in a geographically very distinct location and finding my way down to the ground on visuals only would be extremely easy.
I would have to hope that it were dusk/dawn, as it’s easy to ballpark Edmonton due to the Rockies, but without lights Google Earth makes narrowing it down more a tad tricky.
Given I pass the middle bit, between the river, the city\rural border, and the fact that it’s the largest feature around, it’s a cinch to find the International. If it’s a weekday, I pull out my cell phone just before final to ask my coworker to nip across the highway and pick me up. Hope no-one’s cleared for take-off as I put down on runway 2 and huff it to the fence before someone asks NASA to check their garage. 
appleciders
You missed my point… completely.
Flying VFR from space cannot be as easy as turning left or right at say Florida (or Crater Lake). I suppose anyone “playing with Google earth” could eventually find there way home. But, in real world flying, with no instruments (fuel gages, compasses, and the ilk), flying a clumsey craft, I doubt most would make it home.
Even with instruments most folks couldn’t fly home… because they don’t know how to fly.
The spirit of the OP was more along the lines of “Could you fly from Earth orbit to your home using just your eyeballs and the view outside the window to navigate.”
I also think people over estimate the number and sort of instruments that are really necessary for that sort of navigation, versus instruments that are nice to have and make the pilot’s job easier.
I live only a few blocks from th edge of Lake Erie, and near a major highway, so easy-peasey. Especially using a spacecraft as I know them…totally imaginary, but very easy to control!
Yep.
Make a horizontal line across Australia, one that scrapes the extreme northern tip of New Zealand. Aim for the east coast. Sydney’s eastern dovetail-shaped penninsula will come up. Come in low over that, and I’d see the city, and Central Station on its southern tip. Follow the Bankstown line until I see the Bulldogs’ Stadium, hang a hard left to the ugly yellow building on top of the hill, and I’m a couple of doors down. Land craft in postage stamp backyard. Try not to wake landlord.
I read the OP as assuming we have a helicopter-like craft that can directly descend from orbital altitudes and be steered in any direction with ease. The question is simply whether visual navigation would be sufficient to move from an orbital altitude overhead a random spot on Earth to your backyard at ground level.
I used to drive jets for a living & while I have no experience above 45,000’, I have a bunch from there down to the ground. Even assuming perfect weather, the problem is rather harder than many non-pilots think. For those fortunate enough to live on the shores of Lake Erie, or some other multi-hundred mile long landmark, finding home would not be too tough. For folks living in west Texas, or central Iowa, not to mention 150 km west of Alice Springs, Australia, the problem is tougher.
Even as a professional pilot it’s not trivial to estimate distances over greatly different altitudes. We develop an intuition about speed & altitude & the apparent size of things. On occasion we fly a familiar route at an unfamiliar (much lower) altitude & everything looks quite different. It is easy to become confused at that point in the absence of either navigational equipment or gigantic and unequivocal landmarks such as shorelines.
People who’ve successfully located their house while riding an airliner on approach to their hometown make a mistake if they assume they could have found it without somebody else putting them in a predictable location nearby.
In pilot training, one of the early skills taught is/was topographical map reading. Even given a map with roads, rivers, towns, and contour information, it can be surprisingly easy to get lost from only a few thousand feet (ie 1 mile) above the surface. Imagine doing that with no map, just your intution about how the area probably looks from above when you’ve never seen it from that vantage point.
Using the US as an example …
When one is high enough to see the whole US, recognizing it would be easy for many people. Even then, a lot of people’s conceptions of the US have Canada and Mexico airbrushed out, as if the USA was an island like Australia. It doesn’t really look like that. We all know this, but still, the desire to find that familiar shape on the ground below will be ringing in your head.
Now drop down to the point where the oceans are all beyond the horizon & you’ll see a vast brown area with maybe a couple of discernable rivers in it & maybe some mountains. Ok, now which way? If you’re going to NYC and you dropped down in the western 1/3rd, heading East is a pretty obvious suggestion. But which way is that? The OP assumes no compass.
My bottom line: If you could correctly spot your metro area or other major landmark from orbit and descend right down on top of it, the untrained navigator could probably end up in the right county, and given enough time at very low altitude (100 feet or so), drive home from there.
But to descend much below orbit & then attempt to navigate across the country by “familiar” landmarks would not work for most people trying to get to most places.
Now add in more typical visibilities in the atmosphere, where slant ranges beyond 30-100 miles (and sometimes more like 3-5 miles!) are too fuzzy to recognize anything, and getting lost becomes almost certain. Add in any significant cloud coverl and it becomes logically impossible as well as practically impossible.
But it would be fun to try.
Assuming no bad cloud cover, it’s a cinch for me:
Find Africa. Find the bottom (this is the hard part!).
Find the sticky-outy bit at the extreme SW. Zoom in.
From an “eye altitude” of 10 km, spot neighbourhood (it does sit on a side slope of one of the most distinctive mountains in the world, you know). Zoom in.
From an “eye alt” of 1 km, spot house, wedged between school playing fields and converted blanket factory. Notice that neighbours still haven’t painted roof. Touchdown.
I know I can do this, because it’s exactly the process I followed when I first intalled GE, as the built-in search was pretty crappy. Kept directing me to Johannesburg - that’s the wrong Observatory, you twitware!
It’s improved since.
And what’s amazing about all of this is that the early days, NASA’s scientists figured out what it takes to plop an orbiting object onto the earth wih little more than slide rules and a bunch of math.
If I were in something resembling a helicopter that can hover, or at least move side to side slowly, I’d have relatively little problem finding home by VFR (Ve Follow Roads) method. Wouldn’t be too tough just by geography either. I’d just have to be careful not to land a quarter-mile in any direction, and even if I do nail the landing, to do it quietly and quickly before anyone at the Naval Weapons Station notices. What a wierd place for a neighborhood! Right in the middle of 12,000 acres of bunkers and silos.)
If I had to hit the mark by means of being up in orbit, and having to either punch something into the computer and press “Land” or steer a path from re-entry to home without being able to significantly slow down to have a look out the window, I don’t think I’d be able.
Plus, the color coding helps out a lot.
How to navigate to my place from orbit:
Aim for the cluster of five large lakes in the middle of the continent that is joined by a long narrow isthmus to another.
Aim for the second-smallest lake with the big river leading from the far end away from the cluster of lakes.
Aim for the end of this lake closest to the other lakes.
Aim for the tall pointy tower in the large city on the shore near the end of the lake.
Assuming you are coming in over the water, veer to the left of the tall pointy tower, to where a river joins the lake next to two tall towers. A footbridge suspended from white metal arches crosses the river.
Land in one of the parking lots on the beach near the bridge.
Walk home.
N.B. Do not lock the keys in the spaceship. You may need to move it later to avoid a parking ticket.
Thank you LSLGuy, I was beginning to think I was the only one who read “real world” in the original post…Instead of “Harry Potters: How to Fly a Broom After 20 min of Film”.
Assuming that we are starting from orbit, and I have some information about how far ahead of my landing point I have to fire the retro rockets, it would be a piece of cake.
Find the west coast of North America
Look for the part of the coast line that runs east/west not north south
Head inland
Lose enough altitude and speed to find the freeways
Take the 118 to the 405.
I’m just north east of there, about 1 mile west of the mountains.
Don’t hit the spa when landing in the backyard.
FTR I have seen posters that show all of LA taken from orbit. Due to my house’s location between the 405, 118, 5 and 210 frwys, I can spot my location almost to the block. Get me lower and I can pick the house.