PPL Lesson #19: First Nav lesson
First thing this morning I had my first nav lesson, flying EGLK ➤ Wantage ➤ Hungerford ➤ EGLK. Things didn’t go exactly to plan…
For my first attempt I’m fairly happy, though there’s a tonne of room for improvement as is evident based on the Skydemon track:
I’d had a couple of practice attempts at planning the route over the past week or so with the weather of the day, so the planning this morning was relatively easy. When I started the planning this morning I was fairly certain we wouldn’t be flying as the weather was utterly miserable, but thankfully I went through the motions anyway: 30 minutes before the lesson when it switched into scattered cloud with blue skies, albeit looking like it could change at any minute. When I got to the airfield I had a chat with the instructor and we concluded that we’d give it a go - if nothing else, getting some marginally adverse weather practice in wouldn’t be the worst thing. I definitely wouldn’t have gone up if it was me, though.
In terms of the plan, the winds were looking fairly stiff - 244/32 at 3000’ - which gave me a positively pedestrian ground speed of 69kt and 63kt for the first two legs and then a much more spritely 113kt for the final leg, and as much as 19° drift. I found it difficult to always find good identifiable features on this route, particularly on the middle leg, to mark as reference points for timing / heading correction purposes, and it’s definitely something I’ll need to work on going forward. Turns out that “crossing the M4” puts you at any one of a million different places across the chart. Who knew?!
Checking the route on Google Earth, I thought it prudent to fly it in MSFS last night (in nil wind) to try to get some contextual experience with the whole visual aspect of navigation. I’m very glad I did, as if I had to identify Wantage based purely what I can pick off the half mill chart between all the intersecting TMA boundary lines I’d have properly struggled. Hats off to all the folk who flew for decades without any of these modern conveniences and somehow managed not to get utterly lost!
My biggest stumbling block on the flying the route - other than trying to juggle 5 new things to do whist flying, obviously - was on the second leg, where changeable winds meant I drifted well right of track and we ended up directly overhead a reference point that I was expecting to see some distance away out of the right window. Thankfully I was able to identify Hungerford out of the left window based on the river, the railway line and the distinctive riverside train station I’d seen on Google Earth the night before and we made it overhead pretty much on time. Fairly certain without the prompt from my instructor I’d have been heading for the coast, though.
My other takeaway from today is that I need a separate stopwatch to stick on my kneeboard. Trying to navigate to the Stopwatch app on my Galaxy Watch whilst flying straight and level in bumpy conditions was less than fun. There’s one built into the transponder, but it’s buried in a few levels of menu so I suspect it may actually be worse. Any recommendations welcome.
Next lesson is Friday lunchtime with more nav. I’ve got another route to plot - EGLK ➤ Thame ➤ Didcot ➤ EGLK - which looks like it’ll involve my first MATZ penetration and some more complicated altitude management.
Edited to add: I’d picked out that we’d be clipping the MATZ stub during the planning, so I’d written Benson Zone’s frequency on my plog. Having discussed it with my instructor before we set off he said that getting a MATZ crossing would likely be too much workload for my first nav session, and that we’d be okay staying on a basic service from Farnborough since we were just clipping the stub. If I were on my own, I’d probably have planned a crossing anyway, just to be safe.