Follow course by landmarks

Pilotage in practice is unglamorous: fly the heading, watch the clock, tick off checkpoints, and nudge the heading when the ground drifts.

Flying the leg

• Set the magnetic heading from your plan (K1) on the heading indicator and fly it.
• As each checkpoint approaches, look from chart to ground and confirm it. Mark it off on your flight log — a row per leg (course, heading, distance, planned vs. actual time, fuel) that becomes a live picture of plan-versus-reality as you check items off.
• If the checkpoint passes left or right of where it should, you have drift, and you correct it without an E6B.

A concrete leg: you roll out of the departure area on a magnetic heading of 084°, heading indicator set to the compass. About six minutes later your first checkpoint — a reservoir with a dam on its south end — should be off the nose. If it shows up slightly right, you've drifted left of course; correct a few degrees right and re-check at the next point. Note the time over each checkpoint in your log — the running clock is half of dead reckoning, and it's the input to the groundspeed check in S3.

Correcting drift by eye

A useful rule of thumb: if you're off course by about 1 NM after 10 NM flown, that's roughly a 6° heading error. To regain track, double the correction for a few minutes (turn ~12° toward the course), then take out half of it (settle back to ~6°) to hold the new track. The "double-the-error, then half" technique gets you back on the line and keeps you there without a full recompute.

The standard

The ACS skill is PA.VI.A.S5: "Verify position within three nautical miles of the flight-planned route." Three miles is generous — but only if you're actually watching. Drift you don't correct compounds leg over leg, so the pilot who confirms every checkpoint and nudges the heading early stays well inside the tolerance, while the one who "looks up occasionally" wanders out of it.