Yup… piss poor planning truly does lead to poor performance.
Another flying lesson, and yet another lesson learnt!
Rather than the anticipated brush up on landings in the circuit, the instructor (Ches) decided we should do some navigation. Great I thought, although it’s been 2 weeks since I’ve flown and I was a bit nervous .. anyway .. nav has always been easy, so I figured what the hell .. get out, get some hours and the idea was to do it as a solo nav exercise after a brief dry run to prove I knew where I was going.
So I drew the lines, jotted down the headings, did the calculations .. .decided I’d use the “school approved” pilot log rather than my mini A5 log (which I admit I prefer as it means less clutter in the cockpit), so I copied the headings across onto the school’s PLog and we were ready.
However … 255 degrees suddenly became 215 degrees when I copied the heading across. Add to that the fact that I misread 155 as 165 on another leg, and I was going to get lost. I checked it, it looked right. The instructor checked it, he thought it looked right .. so off we go.
Anyway .. there we are en route to Buckingham, I was convinced we were en route to Buckingham, however we were 50 degrees to the left of it and ended up over Winslow .. and I still thought it was Buckingham.
Oops 
So, back to the drawing board … and next time .. double check the angles, and as we’re pottering along, don’t blindly look out of the window and assume that features match – when they quite obviously don’t.
Add to that the fact I was finding it hard to maintain 2300ft … 2100ft – 2600ft seemed to be the order of the day … I felt like a bloody newbie again, not someone who’s clocked up over 50 hours
Must try harder!
