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By marioair
#1619103
A recent flight reminded me of the dangers of getting complacent

On a route I fly very regularly I decided to exercise the grey matter and do it all using a printed plog, and paper nav. No big problem I thought, I know the route. know the landmarks etc but good to practice sans GPS.

After a couple of legs i realised I was consistently off track by about 10 degrees. I was having lots of fun doing error/drift correction and seeing it all work like the text book said it should :-)

After 3rd/4th Leg it was still fairly consistent drift Despite usual FREDA so I knew my tracks needed to be corrected by 10degs west

Rather than do the obvious, I started cross checking HSI v wet compass v G430 as we've had some problems in the past with discrepancies.

Although it only took about 10 mins, I realised I hadnt checked the obvious.....the printed plog hadnt picked up the forecast wind and had assumed 0/0. There was a crosswind of about 20 kts on the day.

Reason for error - having moved house, my laptop doesnt automatically connect to the new wifi, so when i printed the plog it wasnt using actuals.

Lesson - just because you fly a route regularly and just because you have printed the same plog 10s of times, still need to cross check heading and track on the plog to see if makes sense. I would have picked this up straight away with GPS as I routinely compare printed ETA and headings against live GPS, but in this case I had purposely switched off (zoomed out alot) the gps
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By T67M
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1619128
A similar gotcha lurks in SD when the route is saved with a takeoff time - when it is reloaded, the weather for the stored date/time is used which is unlikely to be accurate for a takeoff today.