Initially the plan for today was to do a nav leaving the zone via Dewsbury and routing to Blyton which is about 7nm south of Scunthorpe. However, with some autumn morning fog patches, the vis at Doncaster whose zone we needed to transit was only 8km, so we decided to defer until later in the day in order to allow the vis to improve to zone transit levels. So as not to waste a challenging yet still navigable morning Roger gave us a nav to Mount Airey. Though I'd already done this nav, it hadn't gone very well and I'd struggled to find the airfield in low cloud so a repeat trip wouldn't be a waste of time.
Previously i had left the zone via Eccup but this time to spice it up a bit I planned to leave the zone via Dewsbury. Because the viz was pretty poor (not much above 10km) I couldn't even see Ferrybridge from Dewsbury. However, since I hsd been up esrlier in the morning I had seen that both Eggborough and Drax power stations were operating from their plumes of steam from the cooling towers which were clearly visible above the dirty inversion. At Dewsbury requested further climb to altitude 3500 and, once I'd done my gross error check of Wakefield on the right, I could see both plumes more or less ahead. This put me nicely on track since I was expecting to pass to the left of Eggborough (my halfway point) and directly over Drax.
Eggborough arrived on track & time and Drax was then clearly visible. As I approached Drax, it looked like I was a little to the left of track, but I refrained from making any correction until closer to Drax. When a few miles away I was clearly going to pass to the left of the power station when my track should have taken me overhead. So I estimated to be about 2 degrees and 1nm left so planned to turn right by the usual 30 degrees for a minute, but it was evident that this would have taken me too far to the right, so I revised to 30 seconds. Rolled back into my wind corrected heading and was spot on and passed between the north and south sets of cooling towers. As a bonus this also avoided me flying into the steam plume clouds as they were to the north.
The rest of the leg passed as sweet as a nut and I spotted Mount Airey quite a long way out - so much easier from a decent altitude despite the relatively poor vis. Was given a diversion to Fadmoor which is a few miles to the north-north-west of Kirkbymoorside where I'd visited before. I didn't even know it existed because it was unfortunately right on the fold of my map! Fortunately the instructor said should be ok without having to go through the rigmarole of unraveling my chart.
Freehand drew the line on my chart eyeballed the heading as 330, did a TTT and I was on my way. GEC of Market Weighton spotted and then got the rest of my diversion calculations out of the way and revised my eyeballed heading slightly to a magnetic wind-corrected 335. Everything else happened pretty much as planned/expected. About halfway, however, a few clouds appeared and my altitude of 3500 would take me above them. But since I'd been told that flying above clouds was ok on the CPL as long as I could remain clear of them and in sight of the ground and still able to navigate I made the judgement call and elected to remain above them as they were only a few. In fact, they didn't even get in the way at any point!
Arrived in the vicinity of Fadmoor but wasn't exactly sure of where it was, though I was pretty sure I had spotted it. Said to the instructor that I wasn't 100% sure but I that the location of the strip in relation to two nearby villages and that it was on a ridge between two valleys gave me a good assurance that it was correct. He confirmed that I was correct and mentioned that it's a real bugger to find and most people can't find it - which was nice! The only thing that was slightly wrong was I'd revised my ETA to be two minutes later but was in fact two minutes early - not sure why...
Was given a "divert" back to Harrogate which also went spot on, passing through the Boroughbridge gap without issue since Linton were closed and getting the ATIS in good time and starting my descent at the A1 to be overhead Harrogate at 1900 feet.
Nowt much more to mention really, but in the debrief, there wasn't really anything of note to debrief other than what had been mentioned enroute. I was given a 9.5/10 and was obviously very happy with it all :-)
1 comment:
Did you not see me waving?
a kirkbymoorside resident :-)
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