Cross country VOR work
IR lesson #4
This lesson was a continuation of VOR/DME work I’ve started last time. Looking at my total record sheet we have decided that another 50nm cross country flight is in order. Trying to pick reasonably complicated route without overloading my senses we came up with:
IA24-CID-ALO-KALO-INDET-CID-IA24
The original idea was to introduce intersection (INDET) and try working two VORs. Unfortunately it turned out that NAV part of display on second radio in our Skyhawk is dying and became completely unreliable. But treating it as only slight inconvenience we’ve decided to play with DME. INDET intersection is defined as ALO VOR 090 DME 23. and as it turned out during the flight it was an easy find.
Another good outcome of picking KCID-KALO routes is that I was within TRACONs’ range during whole flight and it gave me nice opportunity to add radio communication into instrument flight mix. My ability to multitask it still somewhat limited by instrument flying load factor but I’m finally getting ahold of things and it’s high time to throw radio in the mix before I start working on approaches.
Post flight briefing notes:
As you may see on the track there is a very pronounced change of course in the middle between CID and ALO despite the fact that tracking this airway should be simple frequency switch. But when I switched frequencies the needle immediately went way to the left and instead of waiting patiently few seconds I started fiddling with CDI and turning left. Nick pointed to me that being so far out from VOR means that slight left/right deviation may actually mean several miles and cause those seemingly big CDI changes, but if I waited a bit longer the needle should come back at least in the vicinity of zero and my track would look much nicer
