Well, if you do timed turns and forget all the other nonsense, you
only need to know the heading when the aircraft is straight and level.

Looking at a bouncing compass during a turn in the clouds and burning
up a bunch of brain cycles at the same time figuring leads and lags
and accelerations and decelerations with your attention diverted from
the instrument panel, is asking for trouble, if you ask me. When your
eyes return to the panel, you will probably find the altitude
decreasing rapidly and your airseed increasing rapidly, and then you
get to do partial panel unusual attitude recovery for real. By this
time ATC is probably on your case about your altitude, and you are
wishing you were somewhere else.

How about instead (1) look at the compass and note your heading (2)
use a compass rose (10 seconds per number on the rose) to calculate
the time for your desired turn (4) concentrate on a nice smooth,
level turn (5) check your heading after the rollout and (6) tidy up
the error, if any.

Not nearly as gee-whiz as all the compass gobbledygook, but a whole
lot safer, if you ask me.





On Fri, 01 Apr 2005 14:06:30 -0600, Ben Jackson wrote:

On 2005-04-01, wrote:
Some examiners don't care.

Others will just tell you your compass heading whenever you ask for
it.

I always thought that was funny, since the hardest thing for me about
the mag compass is reading it.

When I practiced compass turns I did it by looking at the mag compass,
even though I could see outside. The skill I was trying to learn wasn't
attitude instrument flying at that point.