VFR Wycombe to Shoreham
If it's a rental plane or not yours, the AWARE 5 basic has good battery life has a moving chart and can be taken home afterwards.
Free airspace updates each month. In the air shows all likely airspace busts with useful info's too.
IMHO an indispensible low cost piece of kit.
[Mine has France as well, it costs extra, but helped me nav a Rans S6 VLA with many wx diversions past Paris on Thursday, yet I could easily see what space was allowed me & its height & regain my destinations.
mike hallam
Free airspace updates each month. In the air shows all likely airspace busts with useful info's too.
IMHO an indispensible low cost piece of kit.
[Mine has France as well, it costs extra, but helped me nav a Rans S6 VLA with many wx diversions past Paris on Thursday, yet I could easily see what space was allowed me & its height & regain my destinations.
mike hallam
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You have chosen a busy route for a new PPL, I did a similar route after a good number of hours post PPL and it was still a busy trip.
Watch out around Booker and White Waltham - they come at you from all directions! Even talking to both towers it was still very important to keep a very close eye out the window, whist also navigating carefully.
I also did a similar trip a few hours post PPl, me and a flying mate took our instructor and did the Burnham to Ascot SVFR route, this is a low level (not above 1000' agl!) under the western approach to Heathrow! Great fun, they will only allow one plane at a time in any direction so it may not always be available. Also, Heathrow wont let you through if you sound like you are not confident on the radio - we let the instructor do this bit of the radio!
Which ever route you do,, maybe worth taking an instructor with you for this bit of busy airspace?
Watch out around Booker and White Waltham - they come at you from all directions! Even talking to both towers it was still very important to keep a very close eye out the window, whist also navigating carefully.
I also did a similar trip a few hours post PPl, me and a flying mate took our instructor and did the Burnham to Ascot SVFR route, this is a low level (not above 1000' agl!) under the western approach to Heathrow! Great fun, they will only allow one plane at a time in any direction so it may not always be available. Also, Heathrow wont let you through if you sound like you are not confident on the radio - we let the instructor do this bit of the radio!
Which ever route you do,, maybe worth taking an instructor with you for this bit of busy airspace?
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There is a very good DVD from NATS called VFR Around the London TMA which has most of these tricks and routes for reference, it shows both the planning and the flight. Well worth getting hold of a copy.
'You have chosen a busy route for a new PPL'
My qualifying cross country was Wycombe Shoreham Goodwood Wycombe (I seem to remember the fireman signing to confirm the quality of my arrival at Shoreham) - it's nothing that should faze you if you have been trained right.
Wycombe - Reading - Shoreham should work fine, plan what you're looking for and look out of the window while you're doing it. Farnborough radar makes it easy to get over or through their ATZ and Blackbushe.
My qualifying cross country was Wycombe Shoreham Goodwood Wycombe (I seem to remember the fireman signing to confirm the quality of my arrival at Shoreham) - it's nothing that should faze you if you have been trained right.
Wycombe - Reading - Shoreham should work fine, plan what you're looking for and look out of the window while you're doing it. Farnborough radar makes it easy to get over or through their ATZ and Blackbushe.
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I've done this route several times in the past, including on my QXC. If navigating visually without GPS I usually route Henley-on-Thames to Sandhurst then via Farnborough's overhead. That route keeps clear of the Blackbushe ATZ and the Heathrow CTR.
Both Henley and Sandhurst are very obvious landmarks from the air; the former due to the change in direction of the river, and the latter due to the Royal Military Academy buildings, parade grounds and the lake. The route between them is also fairly obvious due to the large junction on the M4 and then the railway line running south-east from Wokingham.
Farnborough have never had a problem with me transitting their overhead (though as previous replies have said, they sometimes ask you to route to the east or west rather than directly overhead if there is traffic on an instrument approach).
Both Henley and Sandhurst are very obvious landmarks from the air; the former due to the change in direction of the river, and the latter due to the Royal Military Academy buildings, parade grounds and the lake. The route between them is also fairly obvious due to the large junction on the M4 and then the railway line running south-east from Wokingham.
Farnborough have never had a problem with me transitting their overhead (though as previous replies have said, they sometimes ask you to route to the east or west rather than directly overhead if there is traffic on an instrument approach).
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If you are going to navigate from landmark to landmark like the previous poster suggested, it helps *a lot* if you 'fly' the route in Google Earth a few times.
It really helps you learn the layout of the different junctions, the way railway lines run through towns, what the parade ground looks like and so forth. Things that you cannot really learn from an aviation chart.
It really helps you learn the layout of the different junctions, the way railway lines run through towns, what the parade ground looks like and so forth. Things that you cannot really learn from an aviation chart.
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Backpacker - I certainly agree on the Google Earth suggestion. Rather than suggesting relying solely on landmarks, I just wanted to illustrate that there are enough helpful ground features in the area to make a stopwatch-map-compass approach easily possible without infringing anything, even for a student pilot with no GPS.
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During my PPL training, I used to fly cross-countries on FS2000. In those days the quality of the scenery was crap, but it was vastly better than nothing. Whether this actually helped I can't say; all the waypoints were chosen to be utterly obvious (like Bewlwater).
The OP's proposed route is not quite so simple to navigate visually because what whole area is densely built-up and is a mess of similar landmarks. Many roads, motorways, etc.
Huge numbers of people bust controlled airspace around there each year, which is why the funding for Farnborough not only continues but the service has expanded.
Anybody not using a GPS is just making their life pointlessly hard.
The OP's proposed route is not quite so simple to navigate visually because what whole area is densely built-up and is a mess of similar landmarks. Many roads, motorways, etc.
Huge numbers of people bust controlled airspace around there each year, which is why the funding for Farnborough not only continues but the service has expanded.
Anybody not using a GPS is just making their life pointlessly hard.
