Lesson #24 Low Level Diversions

Knocked off work a little early and went out to the airport for a 2:30 lesson.

I preflighted the aircraft while Dave finished up with another student, a few minutes later Dave showed up and we pushed Fern over to the fuel pumps and filled her tanks. While taxiing out to the runway I decided to spice things up and do a soft field takeoff, which went well. After about 5 minutes heading north Dave took out the map and asked me where we were, I pointed to a spot on the map, then he chose another spot on the map about 15 miles away and said that he wanted to go there now. We then spent a few minutes going through the steps of how to plot a low level diversion. He drew a straight line from the "box" that we were holding over to the little town where he wanted to go, then he roughly showed my how to calculate the magnetic heading using our airport's compass rose, which was nearby.

With the rough course laid out he then measured the distance between the two points with a pencil and then determined the actual distance by using the tick marks found on the lines of longitude, which are the lines on a VNC that run north to south. These tick marks indicate minutes of latitude, a minute of latitude equals a nauticle mile.

Now we have a heading and the distance, next he figured roughly a 90 kt ground speed and then he calculated the time to destination. Finally he marked check points along the route to use as a reference. We used these checkpoints to verify our drift and time, after each cheackpoint we fined tuned our heading to compensate for the wind and we adjusted our ETA to destination. Plotting a diversion is rather simple to do, but it's a much tougher task when you have to also fly the aircraft, and keep an eye out for traffic.

During our little trip Dave wanted me to stay at a thousand feet to limit my visability (to make it harder). He also had me scan the map and point out cell towers etc. I had a habit of setting the map on the dash, then when I picked it up I forgot to hold it orientated with our direction of flight. After a few reminders I finally started keeping it on my lap properly orientated with our direction of flight. Dave said that it will be much easier for me to keep things straight if I get into the habit of doing this now.

We arrived at our destination on time and we basically followed the route Dave drew on the map, I did have to adjust our heading at each checkpoint to compensate for the wind. After we got to our destination Dave asked me how I would navigate us back to the airport. I told him that I'd follow route 2 back to Charlottetown until I spotted the airport. It seems that following roads and other man made landmarks is a perfectly acceptable way to navigate, when you not using things like VORs to make life easier.

About 15 minutes later we were back at the airport, Dave requested a soft field landing which I performed decently.