Who's Office might this be?

[cstorey]

Rob : good luck, and may I rather tentatively make a suggestion ( tentative because I am not sure what your test will consist of , and it is an awful long time since I did VFR navigation ) : the standard navigational practice is to read from map to ground and not the other way round . If you look at the ground and pick out shapes etc it is all too easy to pick at random a shape thinking it is one place when it is in fact somewhere else, and then you are lost. If you visualise the relationships of places and features from the map before looking out , it is much easier to identify correctly the features on the ground

[tonymadge]

Good point there, also orientation of the map is very important, it makes it easier to read and understand when you have it in the direction your flying, helps take a little off the brain cpu

[thehappyotter]

That makes sense, I'll bear it in mind (and hopefully not panic and forget..)

[thehappyotter]

Been out for a shift today, not easy is it?!

I didn't get us lost though, one bonus!

[DaveB]

Ahh.. G-NMID

I take it you enjoyed it though Rob. Was it a case of 'where did the time go'?

ATB
DaveB

[thehappyotter]

Time flew by Dave, literally.

I didn't get too much of a chance to enjoy myself, was far too stressed with trying to navigate!

They gave me two targets before we left, one close to base and the other about 15nm from there both of which I was fine with as I'd got them planned and plotted on both the map and my brain before we left. At the second I was given a grid reference which I had to quickly find and plot and from there another three targets, two rural and one urban.

That's when I started to find it tough, being sat in the rear left restricted my forwards view and I found myself looking for roads that I couldn't see as we were actually directly above them. I was also plotting complicated routes over towns and villages and along roads when in actual fact, looking forward, I could see a large landmark near the target out of the front window and should have just said to the pilot "see that cathedral, fly to that" and not worried about too many of the smaller checkpoints.

Lots of lessons learned for my actual test, they said if I'd done it for real I'd have passed. That's a good start but I'm still anxious that the level for the real one is going to be so much tougher.

We'll see...

[DaveB]

That is a good start Rob and despite being anxious.. you must be pleased

Nowt wrong with being anxious either. It's obviously keeping you focused and that's where you need to be. Onwards and upwards mate

ATB
DaveB

[Dev One]

Well done Rob!
Hope the real test goes well for you.
Keith

[TSR2]

Really well done Rob. I hope all goes well for the real thing

[Nigel H-J]

Rob, I know many have given sound advice and guidance for your final test flight however, I hope that this link will also give you some extra help and or knowledge to see you through.

Chapter One Section 1.3 (page 4) concerns the art of map reading, just hope that you find this useful.

http://www.rin.org.uk/Uploadedpdfs/stat ... %20opt.pdf

Kind regards
Nigel.