Sun Jan 23, 2022 10:07 am
#1895101
It's possible, I guess, that I was the worst map-reader ever to have taken to the air in my early days of nav. And I don't have any experience of teaching students to navigate.
But I've watched lots of my passengers over the years try and fail to identify quite large and obvious ground features, often only a mile or so away. And I've read a lot of comments here about how mind blowing it all is at the beginning. So I don't think it's controversial to suggest that low hours students barely out of the circuit often have at least some difficulty translating what they see on the ground to what's depicted on the map and vice versa.
What this says to me is that if you plan a route as you describe here, you'll simply never go wrong, because the waypoints are close together and unambiguously and easily identifiable. This sounds like a fiction that bears no relationship to my early reality.
My routes almost always looked like this on the map, and although as you say,
Once I was in the aeroplane, though, and the workload was high, somehow events often conspired for all that to go out of the window. I'd fly the wrong heading for a few minutes, then mis-identify something and/or write down the wrong ETA for the next waypoint, then make the wrong correction, and it all went titsup.com quite quickly.
This period didn't last all that long, for the same reason everything else gets easier with practice, and I got it all sorted out in the end.
I just think it's a bit glib to say effectively that it all boils down to choosing good waypoints and if you do that it will all be fine. I still think that if you need to, if it doesn't come immediately, you still need to pay attention to learning to look, and really see.
It's all moot now, though isn't it? With the magenta line, no one gets lost or infringes any more, right?
But I've watched lots of my passengers over the years try and fail to identify quite large and obvious ground features, often only a mile or so away. And I've read a lot of comments here about how mind blowing it all is at the beginning. So I don't think it's controversial to suggest that low hours students barely out of the circuit often have at least some difficulty translating what they see on the ground to what's depicted on the map and vice versa.
lobstaboy wrote:The point is that the reference point is chosen to be unequivocal, easily identified and only five minutes or so away. We aren't talking about flying for half an hour and being ten miles off track.
What this says to me is that if you plan a route as you describe here, you'll simply never go wrong, because the waypoints are close together and unambiguously and easily identifiable. This sounds like a fiction that bears no relationship to my early reality.
My routes almost always looked like this on the map, and although as you say,
Getting it right depends on good planning, failure to plan properly was never my problem. I was always meticulous to the nth degree during my training.
Once I was in the aeroplane, though, and the workload was high, somehow events often conspired for all that to go out of the window. I'd fly the wrong heading for a few minutes, then mis-identify something and/or write down the wrong ETA for the next waypoint, then make the wrong correction, and it all went titsup.com quite quickly.
This period didn't last all that long, for the same reason everything else gets easier with practice, and I got it all sorted out in the end.
I just think it's a bit glib to say effectively that it all boils down to choosing good waypoints and if you do that it will all be fine. I still think that if you need to, if it doesn't come immediately, you still need to pay attention to learning to look, and really see.
It's all moot now, though isn't it? With the magenta line, no one gets lost or infringes any more, right?
Milty liked this