Things have gone quite well so far with the exception of almost landing on top of another aircraft that snuck in underneath us from a LONG final without making any radio calls. Neither me nor my CFI picked him up after both dutiful visual scans and a look at the traffic scope. I really hope that doesn't happen again!
It only takes once.
Look for traffic as though your life depends on it. It does.
Dutiful is great so long as it's fulfilled. There's no such thing as fulfilling one's duty in scanning for traffic. You either see the traffic, or you don't. If you don't, the one to pay the price may be you.
Traffic can come from behind; do you scan behind, below, and above, as well? You should. Do you raise your wings and lower them to look above and below? You should. Look for traffic as though it's aggressivley seeking you out. Do it with the same vigor that you should drive a motorcycle defensively. Again, it only takes once.
Beside that, I might be the other guy. The life you save might be mine.
When planning a cross country, it is necessary to draw nice thick black lines on them to show the route.
Use a highlighter.
Highlighters can be had today which are erasable, though there's really no need. I'll put stick-up notes on a chart, and at the edges of the chart where the course line goes from one side of the chart to the other, or onto another chart, I'll make a notation of which chart, and where the line goes. I use a lot of charts; I might cross seven charts or more on a typical cross country flight, and it might be seven or ten thousand miles, with up to eighteen pages of waypoints to check off as I go. It's important that I can keep things organized
Part of my preparation, especially in busy airspace, is to highlight each of the points; I put a tick of highlighter next to or over the waypoint, and in some cases actually highlight the routing. You can draw a courseline in pencil and then run a highlighter over it, if you wish. By doing this you haven't really covered up any important information on the chart, and you can read what's there through the highlighter.
If you're going to be flying at night highlighter doesn't always show up, and it won't show up in certain colors of light. Various colors of highlighter are available, and you can experiment with the highlighters that are available and different colors of light, to see what works. I just pulled several highlighters out of my bag and tried them with different lights; blue light brings up the highlighter very well, and of the different samples I had in my bag, the Sharpie Smearguard was the brightest. It works like a charm.
Same question on the E6-B wind side. It's necessary to draw a line and a point on the face of the wind computer...over time it will just fill up with lines.
I do, with a mechanical pencil. I've also found that a dot with a ballpoint pen works great; you can rub it away with your finger and won't need to worry about marking up the instrument.
I do most of my writing in the cockpit with pencils. Personally, I use mechanical pencils with a 7mm lead (smaller leads tend to constantly break if I'm writing in turbulence, and any larger produces too thick of a line for me). I also carry a separate eraser.
The landmarks are not NEARLY as obvious as they are in the King videos and quite honestly they really make it look a lot easier than it really is in an area like mine where finding a landmark is sometimes like finding a needle in a bucket of needles. Does anybody else fly over what you consider somewhat difficult VFR territory?
For what it's worth, I'll say that I really hate the King videos, and find them to be some of the most worthless training devices I've seen. Years ago, I bought their spin video to show students, and it had some excellent footage at the beginning of an incipient spin entry,shot from the top of the vertical stabilizer. Just as the airplane rolled into the top of the funnel, the video stopped,and John King jumped in front of the camera. Nobody needed to see King, but the video was very important. He ruined it; the Kings videos are all about showing them teaching, and not at all about teaching. I really hate them.
Having unburdened myself of that vitriol, you don't need a river to serve as a cross country checkpoint (and in reality, do you really have the
correct river?) In urban areas, towns begin and end. The edges of the towns serve as borders, signposts. The shape of the town, especially larger cities, serves as an important clue. You may not have mountains, but I bet you have cell towers, TV towers, radio broadcasting towers, and other things like powerlines that stand out here and there. Highways are as good as rivers, perhaps even more so, and a bend in a highway or the way it joins with this exit or that road can be very useful signposts to help you guide yourself on your journey.
Remember that navigation takes multiple forms. Pilotage is one of those forms, but it works best in conjunction with as much other input as you can. Dead reckoning helps, and it's not as complicated as you might think. Simplify. If you're half-way though your journey and you've used half the fuel you anticipated, then you've got a useful benchmark. If you planned on burning half your fuel and you started with full tanks, but have used a quarter of the fuel, you're right on target. If you anticipated being fifteen minutes to the edge of this town or that, and now you're over the edge of a town, this may be useful to you.
Know where to go to "bracket" yourself. A cross country, especially a pilotage VFR cross country, isn't necessarily a strict course over the ground as though the aircraft is on rails. Have things to either side of the course that act as fence markers out boundary markers for your course. Is the ocean somewhere to your left today as you head south? If it is, then you know that you've gone too far left if you hit the coast line, but the coast line also serves to guide you to an airport if you need to get reoriented, because it's got unique features that can help you. Were there tall towers depicted somewhere to the right of the course? If you're seeing them now, perhaps you went too far right. Bracketing, working side to side a little to pick up more useful waypoints than you might get from looking straight down over the middle of your course, can be a helpful way to know when you've gone too far out of your way, or to help you find additional waypoints to use.
You don't have to fly over waypoints. Something sticking up in the air, such as a tall building, city,or tower, can be used as an "abeam" waypoint. When it's off your wingtip as you go by, near or far, you can check it off as waypoint passage and move on. Open your mind to various possibilities beyond what the Kings teach; you'll find that there are many things you may have seen all your life that you never viewed as useful navigation tools, which may be just that. See them for the first time. Learning to fly is about doing this in many different ways.
GPS or not...I understand that I MUST learn to navigate by pilotage, both for safety reasons in the case of equipment failure and for my check-ride, and because it's just fun (when you can find your landmark!). However, it's not 1950. We HAVE the technology to never get lost. Should I always take a GPS with me, even during training, to avoid getting lost? I guess I would feel really silly getting lost because my GPS is sitting in my truck. Anyone feel the same way? Obviously the GPS can fail, but it's guaranteed to fail if left on the ground.
GPS is a useful tool, no doubt about it. It puts bombs on target with deadly accuracy, enables taxi drivers to find a house in a neighborhood they don't know, and empowers users of rental cars in foreign countries to not get quite so lost as they might have been. It also dulls the senses of navigators in the cockpit. One of the single biggest complaints of senior aviators are what we sometimes call "the children of the magenta line." This goes back to a little history (and a magazine article), but it's about aviators today who depend a little too much on following GPS and automation course lines, and not enough on basic flying skills.
GPS is a great tool in the cockpit. I use it constantly. I have four independent GPS units in front of me when I'm working, as well as other advanced navigation equipment. None the less, I don't wholly rely upon them, and I intermix with other forms of navigation all the time. I cross check them, verify them, and compare them. I'm also not in the training environment much of the time when I'm using them.
For a student pilot, learning to crawl before walking, and walking before the run, then understanding the basics is more important than being able to blindly follow the GPS. In the learning stage, GPS is a crutch. You've undoubtably heard the analogy of helping a chick from it's egg. Give a young chick too much help, and it may not survive. Overcoming that first big barrier of pecking it's own way out of it's egg is essential to survival, when it first hatches into the world. Same for student pilots. Getting help from a crutch like the GPS can mortally wound your navigation skills in the future. The developmental stages of learning to fly are so crucial to your outlook, your abilities, your understand, your situational awareness of the future that what is a very useful tool much of the time can serve as a handicapping device in the training environment. Before you turn on the GPS, learn the underlying navigation that lays behind it. Being competent in all the various navigation techniques is the key to competence in situational awareness.
I once flew a modern multi-engine airplane on vectors for an approach at night. It was dark, and the cockpit panel was made up of various displays showing position, attitude, and so forth. Terrain displays gave valuable information, as did traffic collision systems, and so forth. A single relatively click, and the displays all went away, the cockpit went dark, and all the instrumentation, radios, navigation, and so on were gone. Spooky. Back to Piper Cub time; back to basics. If one wasn't very aware of one's position before the lights went out, I guarantee that one would be in a world of hurt after the lights went out. That's not the time to start figuring out where the world might be.
Not too long ago I was part of a crew that lost certain electrical features during a descent in very mountainous terrain in Afghanistan. The terrain there is very steep and the approach to the runway passes close to the terrain in places. The vectors we were being given before the problem occurred put us between the peaks of the terrain, such that a wrong turn would be very disasterous. Up until that moment we had terrain awareness diplays illuminated, as well as a courseline, and waypoints visible. I used aircraft radios tuned to the course, and was very aware of my situation. Immediately thereafter, the only information I had was what was in my head, because all the golly-gee-whiz gear no longer applied.
These things happen. They shouldn't happen often, but that doesn't really matter. Whether they happen or not, having the essentials of navigation down are critical to your survival, no matter what level of automation or guidance your aircraft may have for you.
I flew fire for many years, navigating by pilotage, dead reckoning, and by sight to big fires and small, often in the middle of nowhere. When an active fire was ongoing, locating it by the column of smoke was handy, but what of a small fire, or one in which the smoke was laying down, or under brush? Nothing to see, nothing to guide. I began doing that kind of before GPS was available, and we'd often navigate to a coordinate using latitude/longitude with nothing more than a VFR map and DR. When training, we were expected not to find the general area, but to fly to the exact coordinate, say a tree, or a point on a fence line on a mountain pasture. I was thrilled when GPS became available and the early boat-anchor units of GPS and LoRaN units could guide us right to the fence post without having to hunt or look. This is the basic skill you want to acquire; use the GPS later, but learn the ABC's of navigation now. Master the nuts and bolts before you attempt to build the car.
Autopilot coupled to GPS...a question I've wondered for a while. When aircraft are flying a GPS course and there is a decent crosswind, is the flying actually inefficient compared to simply flying a heading? OK what I mean here is that the GPS does not know that there is any wind. Say you are flying coupled to GPS on a heading of 270 magnetic. The wind is out of 360 magnetic at 20 knots. The GPS is going to fly a unit of distance, let's say 200 feet, then check where it is again (I am making up these numbers). GPS says OK, we're too far south, bank right a bit. 200 feet further, OK we're on course, roll out. 200 more feet, we're south again, bank right...on and on and on.
What you're describing is "bracketing," but so far as coupled autopilot operations, it's probably something you won't have to worry about for a while.
When the autopilot flies, it is interested only in doing what you tell it to do. If you tell it to fly a heading, then it flies the heading, and the flight drifts with the wind. If you tell it to fly a course, then it flies the course, and quickly finds the proper crab into the wind to hold that course. On the display in the airplane I'm flying, the actual aircraft heading is displayed as ancillary information; what I'm seeing is the course of the airplane. A little triangle appears to show me where the nose of the airplane is actually pointing (it's not as intuitive as you may think over say, the middle of the ocean). A useful tactic to maintain is to set the autopilot up so that it will immediately switch to a useful heading in the even that the navigation computers fail or a problem develops. If I know my heading that's in use for wind correction, then I can quickly go to flying my heading in the event of a computer failure, and I'll already be set up for wind correction while I take the next steps. I've seen a lot of pilots that don't do this. One day it may bite them.
Autopilots coupled to GPS and other long range navigation devices tend toward very efficient use of the airplane; we have nearly no bracketing, and our position is fixed within .01 RNP most of the time. This means that less than a hundredth of the time will the airplane be somewhere other than exactly where we want it to be, and even then, within very, very tight tolerances. For now, however, concentrate on keeping the airplane where you want it to be using basic hand-flying and navigation. This is the the skill set that will serve you for life. It may even save your life.
One of the modern-day examples that's used very often to show what can go wrong is the loss of American Airlines Flight 965 in Colombia. A trained crew in a Boeing 757 with advanced navigation equipment ran into a mountainside. A controller cleared the crew to fly to Cali airport using an arrival that included a particular waypoint. The crew had already passed the waypoint, but having heard it as part of the clearance, entered the arrival in their computers. The waypoint, a NDB beacon, had an identical name to other NDB's in the database. They didn't verify their course or specify the waypoint. The airplane made a big, sweeping turn back to the waypoint, and in so doing hit terrain, killing 163 people.
Cali Accident Report
Automation is dandy, except when it kills you. GPS is a great tool, but using it when you're supposed to be learning the basics is the wrong time to invest in GPS. Learn to fly, then learn to use.
If one was hand flying, or had the AP set on a heading, say 280 magnetic which would take care of that wind (it's probably not actually 280, just an example) the aircraft is always "clean", meaning there are not constantly aileron's dropping or rising into the relative wind. Would this not be more efficient flying?
The autopilot doesn't do that, and neither should you. The wing isn't constantly dropping or rising. With modern navigation and automation, the airplane finds it's necessary crab to hold the course and keeps it. It doesn't drift around. That's really what you're seeking to do as you learn to fly. Find what works to make the airplane do was you wish, and then find a way to do it smoothly and efficiently. Don't get frustrated as you go. You're supposed to make mistakes; it's the mistakes from which you learn.
Nothing, even an advanced, modern autopilot, is free of errors. Even the autopilot brackets a course or an altitude; it's constantly making small corrections to get back to where it needs to be. Ideally, the small corrections get smaller as you go; your navigation should get more accurate as you fly because you're gaining more information all the time. As you dead reckon, for example, every time you calculate your position and tie it in with something else (like a visual waypoint, when combining with pilotage), you tighten up your navigation. You're able to refine your calculations, get them more exact. That's what it's all about. It's a learning process when you first begin, and it's a learning process years later. Don't stop asking questions, don't stop experimenting, don't stop studying, because just when you think you have it mastered, you'll learn that you're just beginning. Never get too comfortable.
Stay tense.