CPL day 6 (good day, bad day) - part 2

This is the good day piece :-)

Later in the day the weather had deteriorated so we could no longer to general handling or a nav trip, so we ended up doing an instruments flight. This time it was VOR/NDB tracking. Screens up and took off leaving the zone via Ecup and climbing to 3000 feet. I was then asked to intercept the 155 radial from GAM. Tuned in the beacon, idented it no probs and intercepted the radial quite nicely. Then was asked to track it towards GAM and intercept the 280 radial from OTR. Tuned in & idented OTR and proceeded to track towards GAM. The whole trip was in and out of cloud the whole way and bumpy with a lot of up and down drafts. This meant for a difficult time in maintaining heading and especially altitude, but I did a pretty damn good job of it considering my lack of recent experience in instrument flying. This meant that the VOR tracking was good and I was well within the inner two dots (signifying 2 degrees off track) all the way and factored in any wind corrections nicely.

Came up on the OTR radial and turned to intercept accurately. After a while tracking inbound to OTR the needle was moving out to the right a bit towards the two degrees dots. Applied a correction, but it took a long time for the needle to come back in since we were quite far from the VOR. The needle was still a bit out to the right when the instructor asked me to turn 180 degrees and intercept the reciprocal radial and which was I was going to turn. Because I was still a degree or so to the right of track and the wind was about 230 with our track 280 I realised that I needed to turn left so that I would be flying towards the correct radial or otherwise we would have been blown further off track.

Established on the reciprocal heading and here I made the mistake of failing to set the OBS to the reciprocal heading. This meant that the instrument was no longer functioning as a command instrument (ie. needle left "commands" turn left to regain track), but rather the opposite. So as the needle headed towards the two degrees left dot I made an adjustment towards the left when in fact I was still to the left of track and was heading further away from the desired radial. The instructor pointed out that something was wrong and that I was on a heading of nearly 270 (and was heading towards Doncaster's new class D airspace without clearance) and said to turn onto a heading of 330. It took a minute or so to realise what I'd done wrong - a stupid mistake.

Anyway we got things sorted to keep us away from the class D and then the instructor asked me to track inbound to the Leeds NDB which was at the time reading 300. Setting a heading of 290 to allow for the wind worked out very nicely and we tracked it in and Ecup appeared more or less on the nose

Bit annoyed by OBS issue as is was such a silly mistake and spoiled what would have otherwise been a perfect trip, but at least it will etch in my memory the need to correctly set the OBS.