CPL day 15a - hmm this "day" thing doesn't really work...

Although it's Saturday and the CPL is nominally 9-5ish Mon-Fri, one of the instructors, Roger, only does instructing part time and as such comes in over the weekend when there are people who are keen. That's me then :-) So putting this down as CPL day 16 kinda doesn't count as it's not a weekday, so I'll have to rethink things maybe...

Saturday dawned and the weather wasn't great to start with, but was forecast to get much better in a few hours. Went for an 8 or so mile run and then headed up to the airport for 12pm. Having previously been given the destination of Leyburn which is not too far from Catterick and north-west of Ripon I'd had the option of going out via Keighley (west) and then routing north, or via Harrogate (north-east) and then routing north-west planned. Both were identical in terms of distance, and all things being equal I would have preferred the Keighley route since there are better features to navigate by on that route. Alas the cloudbase conspired to make it necessary to route via Harrogate.

Navigation proceeded well and I was able to fund my pitiful halfway feature of a small lake and I was on track & on time and duely arrived at Leyburn on schedule. However, this is where the fun started and things went a bit pear shaped! :-( I was given a diversion destination of Kirkby Moorside (town, not airfield) which would take me straight over the top of Leeming's overhead. Called them up and found that they were active (unusual for a weekend) and so I was not able to go straight overhead and had to route to maintain 3nm clear to the north. I also fluffed my RT a bit which probably didn't help. I routed north-east up towards the disused Catterick airfield which I never actually spotted, but did spot the nearby lakes so knew I was outside their airspace. When they cleared me for a MATZ penetration direct to Northallerton (after liaising with Teeside for me), everything should have been easy from then on.

The problem was that there are next to bugger all features suitable for navigation once you've crossed the A1 just east of Northallerton. I did a 30 degrees heading for minutes and should have been back on track, but for some reason I ended up being too far right of track. And with having no features to locate me relative to my desired track I didn't establish this until I saw the field of Wombleton on my left which put me about three nm off track, but with only about 5 or so nm to run. I initially did the usual 30 degrees to correct, but then realised, just as Roger pointed it out that that wouldn't work and I would need more like 80-90 degrees heading change to reintercept. And in fact I could already see the town when I realised what I was looking at. Bizarrely, with all the track alterations I arrived only a minute ahead of an unrevised ETA.

I was then given another diversion destination of Haxby, just the the north-east of York. This went, on the whole much better with the nav going on track. However, on looking back at my plog just now and trying to figure out why my ETA was way ahead of my ATA (which fortunately wasn't spotted by the instructor), I realised that I mis-measured my distance and read off 26nm when it should have been 16. This made for an 8 minute difference, but had I calculated with the correct distance, the I would have arrived bang on ETA.

We then routed back to Wetherby for rejoin via Eccup and landed with no drama. In the debrief, Roger was reasonably happy with things overall (gave me 6.5-7 out of 10) and mentioned the various mistakes/issues (listed above) that I'd encountered with recommendations around them like being more ready for having to alter track for not being given a MATZ (or other equivalent) clearance. He also suggested that we try a more dead reckoning way of drawing out diversion track line on the chard freehand (to save faffing with rulers), eyeballing the heading and measuring the distance with a finger (eg. the second joint of my little finder is 7nm). We'll try this with him on our nav route tomorrow.