One thing at a time ...
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One thing at a time ...
As I said to the nice man from Luton Radar when I rang him up to thank him for looking after me, perhaps it would have been better if I'd chosen either to pick a route with more challenging navigation than I'm used to or a day with more challenging weather than I'm used to - both in one trip was perhaps over ambitious.
Still, it's a wasted trip when you don't learn anything, and I think I got my money's worth several times over today.
Still, it's a wasted trip when you don't learn anything, and I think I got my money's worth several times over today.
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Oh, nothing spectacular, but the chain of errors was building up and I'm quite sure I was correct both to ask for help and to turn round and go home.
The first error, as it often is, was taking off in the first place. I have identified more than one reason why that was the case, but the weather was definitely one of them. The area forecast was on the OK side of marginal, as were the TAFs; the METARs had been improving all day and had got to being OK; and before deciding to take off I spoke to a couple of instructors who told me the cloud base where they were was 2200' which sounded fine as I only needed 1500' or so (give or take the club rules which called for 2000' anyway).
But even with all weather data looking OK I still didn't actually like the look of the clouds, and should have scrubbed the flight just because it didn't feel right. It certainly felt wrong a bit later on, crawling along scraping the cloud bottoms at 1000' with visibility just a few nondescript fields each way, no visual navigational reference, and even lower cloud surrounding me on three sides, and knowing where I was only by looking at a needle and a DME (OK, so I'd been shown how to use them by instructors, but had never before been relying on them to keep me legal that close to controlled airspace).
Without the proximity to controlled airspace I'd probably just have turned round and pointed at a bright bit of sky without caring much where I was, and then sorted it out when I could see where I was going. As it was I had too many things to worry about, and I really really don't like feeling like that - it's the "I've lost it" feeling that tells me I've completely screwed up.
The first error, as it often is, was taking off in the first place. I have identified more than one reason why that was the case, but the weather was definitely one of them. The area forecast was on the OK side of marginal, as were the TAFs; the METARs had been improving all day and had got to being OK; and before deciding to take off I spoke to a couple of instructors who told me the cloud base where they were was 2200' which sounded fine as I only needed 1500' or so (give or take the club rules which called for 2000' anyway).
But even with all weather data looking OK I still didn't actually like the look of the clouds, and should have scrubbed the flight just because it didn't feel right. It certainly felt wrong a bit later on, crawling along scraping the cloud bottoms at 1000' with visibility just a few nondescript fields each way, no visual navigational reference, and even lower cloud surrounding me on three sides, and knowing where I was only by looking at a needle and a DME (OK, so I'd been shown how to use them by instructors, but had never before been relying on them to keep me legal that close to controlled airspace).
Without the proximity to controlled airspace I'd probably just have turned round and pointed at a bright bit of sky without caring much where I was, and then sorted it out when I could see where I was going. As it was I had too many things to worry about, and I really really don't like feeling like that - it's the "I've lost it" feeling that tells me I've completely screwed up.
