Originally Posted by
jwforeman
I was told to divert. Quick moment of madness trying to find a pen that actually worked on my chart (good timing as ever), eventually scribbled a line on it
Yeah, bit of an artificial exercise, that, with the instructor/examiner doing the flying whilst you mess around with pens and maps and stuff.
In real life you may have to do it in your head, you won't always have a passenger who can do straight-and-level whilst you use your hands for other things like drawing lines.
(Last real life diversion I had, I did have a passenger but it was a foreign schoolgirl with limited English and it never occured to me to get her to do the flying. I just glanced at the map and guessed. Yeah, maybe the navaids would have helped ... except that nothing much was working on that aircraft that day, just the DME IIRC.)