EFT Worries
 

In short, currently on EFT, anyone have any good shortcuts etc. for helping with nav? Any good things to practice that may help?

So far it is by far my biggest downfall; brain seems to loose 90% of its power as the wheels lift off.

Ta much

Being honest, probably a sit down and re-think. It is all about capacity - which is why I never made it.

Understand what you are saying but I think I'll let them decide if I've not made the grade. Don't want to be a self-fulfilling prophecy !

Further info, only flown a few hours so far, just starting nav.

Sit down with the map and "walk the route", imagining what features you will see. An example, a route may be pretty featureless, but, for example, is there a big mast at the end of the leg you can fly to? Big to small, difficult if you are in east anglia or by cranners as its so darned flat! Pick turning points that a mole couldnt miss; reservoirs, masts (on hills), chimneys stand out like the dogs.

Get your pre-hats and post-hats nailed. You can increase your capacity by calculating the drifts prior to getting airbourne and chinagraphing them in your route. once your post hats are done, focus on a good lookout and fly the aircraft accurately one time, Also, compare safety alts to airways above you, nothing more embarrassing than LL abort straight into a control zone! It may seem a bit extreme, but on a damp day with little flying, go and sit in an aircraft and go through the actions you will take at each event, setting the heading, imagining flying the speed, it will work wonders.

other than this, make sure the instructors know you are putting the work in. I used to do a lot of route study when at linton, as I was p*ss poor at low level nav. It got me through. My instructor on one sortie took my map and asked without reference to the map to talk through the route. He wasnt expectign post box detail; what he wanted to know was that if I clocked the wind turbines just north of newcastle airport I needed to turn as I was about to bust their airspace!

Most important point though, if you are flying on heading, on airspeed and have done your route prep correctly, NEVER talk yourself into a ground fix 30 degrees off track unless you are certain; if you get to your turn point on time and you have been flying accurately, and you havent seen your fix, its probably underneath you!

Finally, we all make mistakes, dont beat yourself up about it. If we were all so awesome at nav, we wouldnt have invented GPS. Its a capacity exercise just as much as a navex; capacity, despite what others have you believe is not about being a sky god, its more about doing the RIGHT SORT of preparation before a sortie.

Oh, and when you get to Linton, make sure the compass is set to magnetic and not Gyro!

One of the best pieces of advice from a QFI:

"Next time you have a sh*t take your radio aids map with you"

Quite seriously we were taught a process called the 'dry swim'. This means going though your next navex, step by step, in your head. Go through all your calculations until the steps become automatic and natural. When you have got it all buttoned up you will get airborne with more spare capacity.

I got lost several times during basic flying training. Once at low level, once at high level and once at night. I even got my QFI lost!

Each time I went back to my room and re worked my calculations. On one occasion it was a simple matter of putting the wind dot on my Dalton Computer in the wrong place.

Even if it means canceling a weekend and sitting in your room for a couple of days practicing it really is worth it. My experience was that there were few naturally gifted military pilots. The ones who got through were grafters - and they usually went round posing that they didn't need to do the work.

There were definitely guys who were chopped because they thought the could 'wing it' on ability.

Best of luck and stick at it.

Thanks guys.

Just frantically practicing maths at the mo. I've managed to get through OASC, IOT and the most recently aptitude based cuts so I'd be bloody annoyed to fail now.

So in short, fly the route in my room.

Cracking.

To be quite honest, in my opinion the best thing you could do would be to walk up to your instructor and say straight out that you are having problems with this (he will know that) and that you would really like some help in coming to really understand what you are doing and how to do things quickly and accurately. That's what he's there for.

In my experience, he will be glad to spend some extra time with you and he'll also appreciate both your honesty and the fact that you are aware that you are not quite cracking it yet.

That would be a MUCH better way of getting it sorted than coming into PPRuNe and getting what will inevitably be a morass of contradictory advice and "tips".

Bite the bullet and do it.

visual nav........
 

The clue is in the title. Keep it simple by looking out of the window as much as you can. This is the best thing for keeping your SA high. With the mental arithmetic, practice, practice, practice. Get used to manipulating the 1:60 rule for headwind & tailwind.

Work through as many problems as you can on the ground, go through as many 'what if's' at the planning stage, such as diversions, weather re-routing, high ground etc and it will free up some capacity in the air.

Good luck!:ok:

Sounds patronising, so apologies for that, but have faith in both clock and compass, both have been serving travellers well for centuries and early aviators had nothing else unless you scrape the barrel and add the stars. With short legs an error has to be big to be significant. (1 in 60 rule)

Map study and more map study and typically 5 miles either side of track. Aircrew cunning; if there is a nav aid en-route, use it unless told otherwise, and even if so, it shows that the blinkers have a field of view beyond that of a toilet role. I always chuckle when I pass abeam a VOR clearly visible with no aircraft nav aids tuned into it. TACAN can give a distance if using DME.

Finally, I was on board a multi man aircraft during a students Nav Check sortie. The sortie ran on rails in terms of both timing and position and I thought it sure to be an 'A' pass. He got a C+ because he had not used the taught (leap-frog) procedures at all, and whilst a pass is a pass, there is clearly a game to play also and these days being top of the class can be the differance between getting a cockpit or not.

Have a map stored away that includes Diversion airfields well off the planned route. I have seen an aircraft 25 miles off track to circumvent a thunderstorm, again thinking bigger picture.

Diablo
 

The poor lad's at EFT, on the Nav phase. The art of Radio Aids Nav, at low level, might be stretching things a little.
BV's advice?
Don't plan legs too short becasue your work rate will be too high.
Always, always pick waypoints with lots of vertical extent (Lincolnshire reservoirs always look awesome on the map but will screw you over every time!).
Thirdly, and by far the most important, is relax. Whilst spending every waking hour route-studying seems like it'll bear fruit you need to make time to chill out. Get to the bar/gym/cinema (whatever floats your boat) occasionally.
BV:ok:

During training, we always had the mantra:

Plan accurately
Fly accurately
Think ahead

However, when I went through CFS 20 years later, I thought that the teaching of basic navigation was probably the worst taught of all topics - and it wasn't much better at the UAS. Pet theories, half-remembered previous methods and a dismal lack of standardisation. Worst of all was the concept of pre-flight planning based upon some fast-jet LL 420KIAS technique applied with little thought to a 120KIAS aeroplane at ML.

Since those days, I hear that the RAF doesn't even teach the use of a nav computer for pre-flight planning, but attempts to do so using MDR. Now, whilst MDR is an excellent technique for in-flight use, it is totally inadequate for accurate pre-flight planning; anyone producing a flight plan based on MDR would probably fail the navigation section of a simple civvy puddlejumper PPL Skill Test before ever getting airborne. A good grounding in accurate medium level navigation doesn't take many sorties (some of which MUST be flown solo), but my suspicion is that the F-J mafia has decided that ML nav is for girls and that LL techniques are the only way. I hope I'm wrong, because that really would be utter bolleaux!

Not that long ago, we had a pilot from Valley who'd decided to leave the RAF so was doing some pre-PPL Skill Test training. He said that he'd never used a nav computer and his pre-flight planning was all still-air! He needed to be completely re-taught the basics of navigation; however, at least he was fully conversant with the SCA technique - which certainly does work well even at 90 knots.

That said, always remember that navigation cannot be that hard - even navigators can manage it....:p!!

Good luck!!

General awareness can be helped by finding a net of features on your area map, so that the maximum distance between any two is less than twice your min inflight vis. This way you can always see one of them.
Mark and memorise them. A few a day, whilst on the bog as others have advised.
I seem to remember I needed just under 40 for the whole of Wales.
You will probably need different features for low and medium level.
This should mean that you never get lost at BFT, are able to free nav easily at AFT, and keep SA on the front line.
Like everything else, it's quite a lot of work the first time, but much easier later.
You can also do it route by route. Probably only need 5/6 features for a typical ml navex. Ups your confidence too.

Plenty of advice so far chum, my tupenceworth;

Keep it simple, try to keep the big picture (easy said I know!).

Clock is God- Event cycle will stop you maxing yourself out trying to thumbcrawl along track eg Post-HAT Cx complete, next event is at ?min/sec, map down and LOOKOUT.

Scan
-Lookout for Big feature ahead/other traffic
-Picture for msd
-Instruments for hdg/airspeed/power/CLOCK -next event

Practise mdr esp clock code for drift + g'speed.

Route study as advice already given esp flying the route through on the gnd, give yourself a wind to mdr crunch HAT Cx, ask what if I get a div/Wx avoid and think it through.

The QFIs may look all calm, they will have plenty of local knowledge probably having been there plenty of times before. Take any pilot in a trg aircraft to an unfamiliar area and all will use the techniques- trust them they work!

Occasionally you meet the odd person who has other problems with navigation....

When I was at Biggin Hill doing my post-Bucc/pre-Vulcan reselection session (brightened up considerably by the presence of several chopped fighter control WRAFlettes), a mate turned up for reselection who was the last person I would have expected to have seen there. I knew him from JP/Gnat/Hunter days as being pretty $hit-hot; he'd always breezed the courses and had been posted to the Harrier - the top posting there was in those days.

"WTF are you doing here, mate?", I asked him, "was the Harrier that difficult - I always thought you were the ace of the base!"
"Oh, I could fly the jet OK - and that V/STOL stuff is quite fun really. It's just that they discovered I couldn't really map read! I got through training on heading and time and flew as accurately as I could, so never got off track or particularly early/late. But I'd no b£oody idea where I actually was for most of the time!"

We didn't do 'free nav' in those days -it was all 'heading and time'; the LFAs were tiny and it was only when he got onto the Harrier that they realised he probably couldn't even find his own ar$ehole without a mirror, let alone some obscure ground feature.

But he didn't get posted to Vulcans as were most of us - they sent him to the F-4 as at least it carried a navigator!

Slowlow,

All of this is well intended, but ignore it.

Read post #7 and act on it. If you do take on any of this and then screw it up (likey as you have not been taught its application) you are one trip closer to a review. Also, if you come out with some weird and wonderful nav your instructor may well ask how / where did it come from....

Clue:

Answering " I got it off some people on Pprune" will not endear you to anyone - so do the mature thing and talk to your instructor. Its actually a plus point to identify your own weaknesses and then act to resolve them.

Don't overlok the obvious - map reading and navigation are 2 complimentary, but different, things. Make sure you are doing the right one at the right time. If there are no major features or "handrails" to lead you in, navigation will get you there; if there are good vertical and IP type features, use the map. Just know which technique works best, but good use of the clock and compass will always decrease your circular error of proabability on the map.

I assume you've still not heard anything back about that job with the Diplomatic Corps yet?

Excellent advice BEagle (assuming you want to take advice from someone that's been chopped off at least 2 FJ types)

That'll be why you ended up on F3s then!!!

Ignore all the chaff and ask your instructors - that's what they're there for. If you still can't crack it keep going, if you then still can't crack it - give up. There's no point being a bloody fool about it.

Perhaps you could contribute something useful rather than just some stupid sniping?

I did say excellent advice!

By the way, which point are you contesting, the quality of advice or the number of types you've been chopped from?

Have a look in AP3456 there are a number of chapters that can help you out. Otherwise, speak to the Basic Nav instructors on 55Sqn (if they are still there) there is a wealth of experience and they teach it how it should be done!