Flight following is f#cking fabulous.

 Sorry for the profanity but they are truly amazing.

A little bit of background. The cross country out west is kind of brutal. It’s over a lot of featureless terrain and what terrain there is all looks the same (at least to me anyways). While the flight out east is over a whole lot of nothing (not much in the way of civilization), the flight out west is much much harder to navigate.

I knew it was going to be an issue. But I had a plan (sorta!)

The leg from Waterloo to Tillsonburg is the worst. Basically you fly your heading and have faith that there is going to be an airport at the other end of it. An invisible airport, just to make life interesting.

I didn’t have much faith, especially after my epic failure to find a large international airport.

It got worse.

Waterloo kept me on a “fly runway heading” course waaaay longer than I anticipated or wanted. I knew that every minute on that heading took me further and further away from my intended track. This was going bad quite quickly.

What to do?

Well you see the funny thing about planes is that they don’t actually know or care if you are lost. They don’t plummet out of the sky because the pilot is clueless as to their actual location.

This can be a good or bad thing. It’s good because the plane stays in the air but bad because they will quite happily blunder into any controlled airspace they happen across. And really it’s no good panicking about being lost.

Panic doesn’t make you magically “unlost”, it just makes you stressed and lost.

Now you have two problems, you are still lost but the chances are you that you are going to do something stupid about it. Whilst having a giggling fit about the fact that you are, yet again, lost; may not be the most conventional approach. It doesn’t do any harm. It lets you take stock of the actual situation and realise that; one, the plane is indeed still flying and two, the chances of you blundering into a control zone are fairly remote because you are in fact on "flight following". If they want you to pass through a control zone, they hand you over.

So the plane is in the air, someone knows where you are and you are finding the whole thing a teeny bit amusing. There are definitely worse situations to be in.

Wait a minute , someone knows where I am right, so lets ask them for directions. 

One radio call to flight following

One request for a bearing.

Basically I told them that Waterloo had given me a funky departure and asked if they could give me a heading to Tillsonburg.

They did….. and more. They very nicely gave me a heading and counted down my distance every 5 miles until I could see the airport.

The airport was still fricken hidden but there was something else that allowed me to get a good idea of where it was. That’s for another post though.

Seriously though, I have no idea where the people at Toronto Terminal are based and I know that I am very literally just a blip on the screen to them. But this “blip” was eternally grateful for a professional service, graciously delivered that got me to the airport intact.

You guys ROCK!