Compass turns revisited

"Michael" wrote in message
oups.com...
Some students just don't get math. For them, the mental math required
to figure out how many seconds the turn needs to be is too much to do
while flying under the hood. For others, the jumping around, lead, and
lag of the compass is too difficult to deal with - they prefer to time
the turn, the check the compass only in level flight.

For some reason, despite two 'A' levels in maths, I have brain failure with
my three times table when trying to figure out timed turns. So long as I
take a few seconds to double-check your multiplication, though, and I sanity
check it (e.g. if you're turning 120 degrees it should take less than a
minute, not more) it's not a problem.

I personally belong to the latter camp. I am a strong believer in only
looking at the compass when I know it will be accurate, and using time
for turns when the heading gyro is not available.

Seconded. The two aircraft I spent most of my learning hours in had
compasses that were pretty grim (mainly around North and South, of course)
unless you were flying absolutely straight, which made even checking the DI
a bit of a chore. There wasn't really an alternative to a timed turn if you
wanted to end up pointing even vaguely the right way.

D.