Ah, yes, and that's another one I've learned.. it's nothing short of amazing how accurate time and distance is if you stick to it... I've not been right once when I've obeyed the inclination to head off over there a bit, and I've not yet missed when I've followed (or been smacked on the head and told to follow) the plog heading.
Well, appart from the time I got the deviation the wrong way round, but that was early on.... and the instructor sat next to me was having a good giggle
Edit: Just to pick up IO540's comments too:
100% agree about the difficulty of finding one's self from absolutely lost. That's where the various map techniques attempt to cut down the area you're considering, and you'd be absolutely bonkers not to use any technology available.
It's also very worth pointing out that it's important to figure out what you did wrong, rather than immediately start to correct. - e.g. note you've been flying 45deg off heading for 10 minutes - to give you a probable position, not turn 45deg the other side and hope.
I always use 'wallclock' time, avoids any stopwatch snafu scenarios, write up the time at the waypoint, add numbers to get the time at the next.
I also tend to draw up a mud map, or script with things to check along the way - expect to cross a road here, lake there, change to a different frequency here sort of thing, rather than make it a 'fly 30 minutes and hope' exercise. That provides early indications and reduces the risk of false positives.
At the risk of drifting the thread into a fairly common holy war, I'm not intrinsically against GPS, but a large proportion of the a/c I rent flat don't have one. Then you can also get the scenario of last week when I thought "ah, that one's TV guided, I'm in a rush, I'll use the GPS to help me round the airspace steps" Got airborne then realised the data card had walked = no airspace, no airfield waypoings, no significant data on the moving map. So back to track crawling and being very conservative. Lesson learned. For the return I plotted an inbound track to an NDB and used the VOR to mark off each of the airspace steps.... then got a direct to @6500 clearance anyway. Much smoother above the convection layer
