anyone who flies from WW would easily recognise Reading
The reality is that Reading is just a big collection of houses, and there are loads of those all over the place. One can make these statements with local knowledge but if one goes up without local knowledge one just sees a sprawling mess of very similar stuff. I have 800hrs, BTW.
Recently I did a few days of training out of an airfield N of London and despite flying around there for a few days I would not have been able to navigate visually reliably.
His heading was supposed to be 027 degrees for 72 miles
Flying a heading of 072 instead of flying one for 72 miles is a common human error, like 180 v. 080, etc, but it can't be the whole story because nobody would plan to fly a
72 mile leg on dead reckoning
Maybe in the darkest Africa where you will get boiled up into soup if you land in the wrong place, but not just N of Heathrow.