Back to Basics - Series 2, Lesson 3

Executing your flight plan

In our previous issue, we started some basic flight planning for our first navigation exercise. In this instalment, we will complete that planning before taking off and putting it into practice while learning some simple techniques to keep us on track.

True vs magnetic

The next section of our flight planning we need to complete is to determine our required ground track. To do this for our first leg from Eugene/KEUG to Oakridge State/5SO, our first turning point, we need to measure the angle between that track and true north. This simple to do and only requires a basic protractor (or better yet, an inexpensive aviation-specific navigation protractor) and the chart with our planned route drawn in. Figure 1 shows how we measure the angle using the lines of longitude. In this case, our true track from Eugene Oakridge State comes out to about 123°.

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