"Trent Moorehead" wrote:
Here's the important step: I checked over the Navigation log to make sure
that it somewhat matched my crude manual numbers.

Excellent idea. The problem with computers is not that they make
errors, but that they don't notice or care if you feed them bad data.
Garbage in, garbage out. Type in the name of a GPS waypoint wrong and
the computer is perfectly happy to send you to Nebraska instead of New
Jersey.

I once sat in the cockpit of an airline flight during the pre-flight
preparations for a flight to Bermuda. Between the plane's computers and
the airline's dispatch department, the flight was planned about as
carefully and accurately as possible. But the pilot still pulled out a
chart and a plotter (looked just like the one you got in your student
pilot kit, except that it had the airline's name printed on it and
looked like it had accumulated a lifetime's worth of dings and
scratches), drew some lines, and went over it leg by leg verifying that
the headings and distances the computer spat out looked reasonable.