Preparing for your first XC
Going cross country for the first time can be very intimidating, and of
course, many pilots never bother going XC, preferring to stay on the ridge
and develop their skills there - which is a perfectly reasonable thing to
do, of course, and there is no obligation to go XC.
However, going XC can be very rewarding, and challenging, and does mean you
need to perfect your skills like thermalling, landing out, etc. However,
before you go XC, there are certain other things you need to do:
- Buy some airmaps and learn how to read them. There is
a lot of restricted airspace around our sites, and it is essential that
pilots intending to go XC do not infringe that airspace. Landing in the
middle of an RAF airfield is not a good idea!.
- It is definitely worth buying a GPS with
MapSource, i.e. a GPS on which you can load the airspace, so that
you know exactly when you are approaching somewhere you should not be! This
does not replace buying and understanding airmaps, but it does make
navigation when you are flying a lot easier.
- Get your Pilot P qualification. This
involves study and an exam, covering airlaw, meteorology and principles of
flight. Study guides are available from the Isle of Wight web site.
It’s very important to get this because, without it, you have no
third party insurance when you go XC. Hopefully you will never need this -
but each year, there are claims on it, and imagine the cost if, for
example, you take out a power line (as has happened). Once you are ready to
take the exam, contact Dave Thomas (coaching@longmynd.org) and we will
arrange a time and place for you to do it. You can also download a list of tasks for the
pilot rating and the Pilot exam
syllabus.
Other sources of information are
Helping you go XC
From time to time, club members will run XC courses and guiding on our
sites. There are also various other sources of information:
- Some podcasts on going XC can be found on Judith's podcast
pages
- Her pages also include some XC tips
- You can also download, in Word format, a series of
exercises designed to help you prepare for going cross country. Thanks
to Roy Dade for these.
- We also have some short tasks which you can do to help your develop your
general flying and XC skills. The idea behind these tasks is to encourage
low airtime pilots to take the next step and fly XC, learning how to fly
away from the ridge whilst using a GPS receiver and flying to a waypoint or
set of waypoints as you would do in a competition. See the tasks page.