Right! First real post. Today was my first navigation exercise- all the way to Sturgate from Nottingham and back. Sturgate doesn't sound like the most exciting place in the world, but it was for me today. It was a chance for me to show off my newly learnt nav skills- which I must say, I cocked up.
I got up this morning at 7am, bright and early and feeling smug doing my route plan first thing. I checked the TAFs, METARs and spot wind charts, wrote all the relevant information down correctly but all that doesn't really matter if you can't use the CRP correctly.
Having taken off and passed the runway overhead, we were clearly tracking waaaay too left to have a heading of 027. Sure enough, I'd compensated for wind in the wrong direction- all 40 knots of it. Naturally, that screwed up the heading, the ground speed estimates and finally the flight time with all the check points. Now totally off course, any new off-the-cuff estimates are also wrong. Adding insult to injury, the planned altitude isn't available as the ever persistent cloud has decided to lower making everything totally wrong! I never knew you could genuinely not know where you are after 5 minutes. Welcome to real life flying I suppose.We made it there and back in one piece thankfully; estimates out of the window. Rubbish landing though- flared too high and approached to fast- sloppy after a flying drought late December. More circuits to come I think!
Moral of today's story: compensate for wind in the right direction when planning.
Now, on to revising Human Factors and Pilot Performance for tomorrow's exam.
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