A cross-country run

If you were an indoorsy kid like me, the title of this post probably brings back bad memories of slogging through muddy fields in the winter rain. But today's cross-country was much more civilised: a cosy cockpit, a chart and compass, and clear views of the beautiful terrain of East Anglia. Enjoy it with me.
Owing to our usual aircraft being away for its 100-hour inspection, and some beautiful weather, we opted to take a break from our usual programme of doing many many landings, and instead take a first look at navigation. Instead of planning a route in advance, the idea was to plan on-the-fly, as if we'd decided to divert in-flight and had to navigate to a destination we hadn't planned. This is something that always comes up in the skills test, and my instructor thinks it's a nicer way to introduce navigation than starting with planning in the map room.
Once we've taken off from runway 05 and climbed to 500 feet, my instructor tells me to continue to climb to 2500 ft and sets me on course for Newmarket, the next town to the east. He also tells me to work out a course from there to Sudbury. With a known starting point, all I need to do is find it on the chart and guesstimate the bearing by eye. It's almost exactly south-east, so 135°. Usually we'd also have to apply a wind correction to that, but we checked the wind in advance and it's "light and variable", so that's one thing less to consider. We can also estimate the distance to Sudbury: we prepared by measuring my thumb, from its tip to the first knuckle, and it's about 10 nautical miles (nm, which in aviation is usually pronounced "miles") on a standard half-mil chart. Sudbury is nearly two thumbs away from Newmarket on the map, so call it 18 nm away. Since we cruise at 100 knots (nm per hour), it'll take us 18% of an hour to reach it, which is just over 10 minutes.
The little tricks of mental arithmetic and approximating measurements by eye make it quite easy to get to this 'good enough' result, but it needs to be easy: while I'm holding up the map to look for Sudbury, I'm also keeping an eye out of the window for traffic. While I'm multiplying in my head, I'm also keeping the aircraft at the correct climb pitch, and trying to keep it on the correct bearing for Newmarket, which by now is invisible under my nose.
The invisibility of Newmarket is a reminder that I need to lower the nose every 1000 ft or so during a climb, to check my blind spot for traffic, and soon enough we reach 2500 ft and I level off. Compared with our usual aircraft, this one is a little underpowered, so it takes a bit of adjustment to find the right throttle setting to give us level flight at 100 knots.
Reaching Newmarket, the most obvious landmark looks like a big shed in the middle of a field, which turns out to be the famous racecourse. Overhead that, we can turn onto our new course of 135°. It's also time to report our position to Cambridge Radar.
Golf Whisky Bravo, Newmarket time 12, altitude 2500 feet, direct Sudbury ETA 22.
Golf Whisky Bravo.
In one transmission, we've given our position and when we reached it, our altitude, and our next position and when we expect to be there. It's important to include the time because on a busy radio frequency, we might have been halfway to Sudbury before we got a chance to transmit the report.

Now we're on our way, the instructor asks me to find some landmarks on the map, and then look for those same landmarks outside, to confirm that we're heading the right way. Close by our track on the map, I can see a disused aerodrome which we used a few weeks ago for practice forced landings (PFLs), as well as the local wind farm which I've flown around many times. Further away on our right is Haverhill, the largest town in this direction. That's a bit harder to spot on the ground: although the chart shows the shape of the built-up area, it's quite hard to be sure it's the same as what you see. Even so, with three landmarks it's looking good.

The next legs follow in much the same way and after about 45 minutes we make it back to Cambridge for another practice landing. Landings are starting to be incident-free and this one was no exception. Overall, my cross-country run was a nice change from practising circuits, and gave me some much-needed practice at recognising landmarks from the air.