Lunchtime Pilotage
Today I spent 1.4 hours in a C-172 to get a little pilotage experience in again. The goal was to fly "by the seat of the pants" from JGG to EVM. What that means is that I did no pre-flight planning for the route I would take, other than to see that I needed to go generally SW. I wanted to see how I would do with just the sectional - trying to use remote VORs and landmarks from the map to know where I was over the ground.
This is fairly hard to do in southern VA as there are very few good landmarks - no big lakes or cities on the route I would take. Part of the time I would just look for landmarks such as small highways intersecting railroads or power line right of ways. The other part of the time I would determine the radial I was on from 2 nearby VORs and see where they intersected on the map. The latter is a pretty good technique to gain positional awareness, but you really need to actually draw the radials on the map to know where exactly they intersect.
I did OK with the pilotage - did not end up with a perfectly straight direct-to route but wasn't too badly off. I was about 8-9 miles off course when I finally spotted the airport. With proper planning I could have done better, but considering the point was to make it a real challenge (as if I had gotten lost on a real trip) I was happy enough with the result.
Going back to JGG via pilotage was a lot easier because the James River makes a great landmark that is visible at a good distance. Coming back into JGG was its usual challenge. There are large amounts of traffic on the weekends at lunch time. In fact, I needed to do a 360 circle for spacing before entering the pattern to ensure I gave plenty of room to the 2 airplanes I followed down to the runway. It was also made more complicated by people giving bad position reports over the radio. A couple of people said they were "right over Jamestown Island" about 4 times over a 10 minute period. They weren't flying in circles and the island is small so I guess some calls were not exactly accurate. There were also people using their full N number on the unicom frequency when it wasn't needed - this meant they were wasting precious airtime on a heavily used frequency.
I spent most of this flight up at 4500' and 3500'. The air temperature was in the upper 50's at 4500'. Quite refreshing on a summer day!
This is fairly hard to do in southern VA as there are very few good landmarks - no big lakes or cities on the route I would take. Part of the time I would just look for landmarks such as small highways intersecting railroads or power line right of ways. The other part of the time I would determine the radial I was on from 2 nearby VORs and see where they intersected on the map. The latter is a pretty good technique to gain positional awareness, but you really need to actually draw the radials on the map to know where exactly they intersect.
I did OK with the pilotage - did not end up with a perfectly straight direct-to route but wasn't too badly off. I was about 8-9 miles off course when I finally spotted the airport. With proper planning I could have done better, but considering the point was to make it a real challenge (as if I had gotten lost on a real trip) I was happy enough with the result.
Going back to JGG via pilotage was a lot easier because the James River makes a great landmark that is visible at a good distance. Coming back into JGG was its usual challenge. There are large amounts of traffic on the weekends at lunch time. In fact, I needed to do a 360 circle for spacing before entering the pattern to ensure I gave plenty of room to the 2 airplanes I followed down to the runway. It was also made more complicated by people giving bad position reports over the radio. A couple of people said they were "right over Jamestown Island" about 4 times over a 10 minute period. They weren't flying in circles and the island is small so I guess some calls were not exactly accurate. There were also people using their full N number on the unicom frequency when it wasn't needed - this meant they were wasting precious airtime on a heavily used frequency.
I spent most of this flight up at 4500' and 3500'. The air temperature was in the upper 50's at 4500'. Quite refreshing on a summer day!
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