- Buy flying magazines and go wherever the free landing fee vouchers take you (some weird and wonderful places)
- Take a CPL holder/student with you on flights and ask them to give you diversions en route and give yourself very small hard places to find. My CPL instructor made me find a small take-away shop in Birmingham! Sounds hard but you just apply the basics on a much detailed scale. You don't need to go this extreme though, I was just coping well with navigation.
- Don't practice GH as you might pick up bad habits, but by all means practice PFLs. I wouldn't practice IF much either, just let your instructor show you the best way from the start of your CPL.
- Fly far afield. You will learn a lot from flying in unfamiliar places. I flew out of one small GA field that I'd never been to in my hour building. I misidentified a mountain to be something else, applied my heading and time and soon realised I was completely lost.
- Challenge yourself. My instructors told me you would never get a zone transit for major airports in the UK. I did about 12, including those airfields instructors said were impossible to get. So ignore what people say you can't do...give it a go and challenge yourself! Another challenge I did was go to airfields that were notoriously hard to find, or extremely busy, different country etc. Don't do anything stupid though.
- Learn to fly a new aircraft. My PPL training was doing on a C152, the last 20 hours of my hour building was done in a Piper.
I also recommend taking a small GPS with you. Never use it for navigation but just for emergencies. One story of mine was I went flying from the south of the UK to the north. I was in an area where I could get no radar service and all the local ATC was closed because they were military and it was a weekend. The terrain was rising and the thick overcast cloud was lowering, vis deteriorating and it started to rain. This was not forecast. Being a new PPL the workload was enormous deciding what to do, what my position was and where should I divert around. On top of that I was getting distracted by close encounters to a police helicopter and some form of fighter jet. Thankfully I whipped out a GPS from my bag and that took care of the "where am I" and got rid of a lot of the work load.
Lot of experiences on my hour building, some fun and some not so fun. It's a steep learning curve. And if you don't have any interesting stories about your hour building, you were probably too boring with it.
Last edited by pudoc; 17th Apr 2013 at 00:45.