Where the &*%£ am I??
Well, a very interesting first today; I hadn’t flown for 3 weeks and I went for a jolly in the local area this afternoon from EGTB, my home field – the vis was good, cloud base 2,500 ft, but the wind was 030 17kts gusting 30kts across runway 06. It was bumpy in the climb and choppy all the way up to Milton Keynes and across to Silverstone. By the time I headed home, I was beginning to feel queasy, but at least it was quicker coming back than going as Aylesbury came up rather faster than I expected it to. Imagine my surprise then, not to be able to find either Princes Risborough or The Chiltern Ridge.
After a couple of orbits, from which I could still see Milton Keynes (looking not as I remember it at all, but I could definitely see the snowdome) I dialled up 121.5 and confessed to being unsure of my position. The guys there were great, gave me a squawk and, lo and behold, the town below me was Leighton Buzzard, not Aylesbury – a classic case of trying to make information fit my mental picture, rather than vice versa.
In addition, the DI had wandered a good 45 degrees, but the compass had been swirling about so rapidly (and I had been lazy about my Freda checks) I hadn’t noticed the error. Hence a course of 170 degrees was actually 125 degrees. Doh!!
London gave me a vector for Booker and quickly Halton came up and I was pretty much home free.
But a real lesson was learnt about complacency and how a whole bunch of little errors can add up to being lost in what is figuratively my bloody back garden. A lesson learnt (I hope).