I showed up at the airport on Tuesday half hoping we would fly, half hoping we would not. It’s not that I don’t want to fly, but I spent most of the the weekend on the couch at the mercy of my bad allergies. I was feeling better by Tuesday, but still not 100%. I wouldn’t have flown solo, but I figured I felt well enough for a lesson, although I suspect it wouldn’t have been all that productive. As it turns out, my instructor wanted to spend some time on the ground talking about VORs. Perfect!
We covered much of the basics, reviewing much of the stuff from private pilot training. The Citabria I had owned a few years ago had a VOR receiver/indicator and DME. I used them quite a bit, so I wasn’t as rusty as I thought I would be. My instructor gave me some good tips and tricks for figuring out where you are relative to the station, just by looking at the VOR and without turning the OBS. The most important thing I took away from our discussion was to completely ignore the Heading Indicator (HI) when trying to determine where you are relative to the station and when selecting intercept headings (for a radial). When in the air, I think there is a tendency to get confused by looking at the HI and trying to combine your heading information with the data given to by the VOR indicator. I’ve often found myself saying or thinking things like, “I am flying at 070, but the OBS is set to 150 and the needle is off to the right, I must be…” The problem is that by interjecting the current heading of 070 into the equation, I’ve introduced information that doesn’t necessarily need to be factored in at that particular time. If you ignore the HI and focus solely on the information presented by the VOR indicator, I think the mental calculations become much simpler. Remember, the VOR doesn’t know what your current heading is!
Let’s look at an example. Suppose you want to fly a heading to intercept the 180 radial outbound. Remember, forget about the HI for now. Instead, look only to the VOR and turn the OBS so that it reads 180 with the FROM flag. Remember you want to intercept the 180 outbound. If it had been the 180 radial inbound, you would want to turn the OBS to 360 with a TO flag. With the OBS now set, where is the CDI needle? If it is displaced to the left, then to intercept the 180 outbound radial, you simply need to turn to a heading between the course in the Index set on the OBS and 90° to the left of that course. If the needle were displaced right, it would be a course 90° to the right. In this case, since 180 is set in the OBS, any heading between 090 and 180 would intercept the 180 radial, with the ideal intercept angle around 45° or a course of 135. NOW (emphasis intended) you can look at the HI, and turn from your current heading to a heading of 135.
Easy-peasy right? Well put me in the airplane and get me airborne; hopefully I won’t go instantly stupid. 
