Flight log anxiety is wholly unnecessary. You fill out a flight log for one basic reason: To determine if, with the winds as forecast, you have enough fuel to make it to your destination (with some left over). It is not a matter of getting lost. When it comes to following the headings on the flight log, forget them!! You are a VFR pilot, navigating by ground reference, whether there is a CFI in the right seat or not. As soon as you see that the lake/railroad/stadium/golf course/etc that you were supposed to pass on the right is on the wrong side of the airplane you wake up and make a course adjustment...who cares what it says on a piece of paper.
Bob Gardner
This. Couldn't have said it better.
I'm the overly analytical sort. I didn't really "get" that I could just get in an airplane with a map and go somewhere without fifty pages of flight planning for a number of years.
Someone finally told me to go make sure I knew how much gas I had on board and then roughly plan a flight to somewhere not bounded by crazy airspace or anything, and just use the compass, a watch, and landmarks, and go.
Guess what? I got there, and landed, and had lunch, and flew home. And that was many many years ago. It was enjoyable.
Don't get hung up on the details of the flight plan. Zoom out once in a while a remember the point of the exercise is to navigate successfully to somewhere and things like missing a heading on the paper become pretty obvious when you relax. "Hey, that airport is northeast of here and that heading I wrote down is southeast. Hmm. Something wrong here."
It helps to just look at the chart and get an oversized overview of what the overall goal/accomplishment is -- before digging into the weeds of headings down to the single degree scale. Also helps to sometime do the math and figure out if you fly for an hour with a course that's five degrees off if your intended course with no ground references to fix it, just how far away from your destination are you anyway? Not that far. Find a landmark or three along the way, and you're there.
I think the advent of the non-paper chart and the computer calculated flight log, has messed up the accuracy scale of things a bit for VFR pilots in their heads. Point the airplane within 5 degrees of where you're going and start looking for landmarks. You'll get there just fine. Save the one degree increment stuff for later.
Plenty of folk have flown across the continent with nothing but a paper chart, a watch, and a bouncy mag compass and lived to tell the tale.
The flight log part and the time crunch was just what set me off on a bad state of mind. So, I do understand that it's the self-doubt that I need to get over, not letting nervous feelings grow into a distraction.
I used to fall into this trap. Remind yourself that obsessing about one thing will make you miss a bunch of others, and zoom back a bit from the process.
You said you "thought about the consequences" of the error, but how bad was it really? You really going to not notice you're heading the wrong direction for an airport by a huge margin, once you're aloft? And if you do, what's the real worst case scenario?
You also said "what if my instructor wasn't there to catch it?"
Two things there. Your instructor *is* there right now for exactly these things.
Additionally and others have mentioned it, modern flying usually includes using some GPS gadgetry and toys for most of us, even the weekend warriors with no GPS in the panel. You'll likely both want to have and really will like having a gadget with you for "fun" flying that'll make your life a whole lot easier in the "am I on course?" line of questioning.
You're learning the basics. A map, a compass, a timer... But most of us have a little help from modern technology when flying for fun these days. We know how to get there if the gadget quits, but we don't obsess over the planning anymore. We let the gadget draw the initial plan and we *review* it with the knowledge you're leaning now, to see if there's airspace issues, or terrain we don't want to fly over, etc...
And once we are satisfied that the computer did an "okay" job and adjust it to meet our goals, we fly it with the gadget. Maybe printing it out in case of gadget failure. Or just making a mental note of airports along the way, big landmarks, and general headings.
So... "Real world" there's both realities. A compass and a map and a watch will get you there as long as you're looking out the window and correcting the course with landmarks. The gadget will ALSO get you there, and most of us have them with us, too, for that $100 hamburger run.
Put both together in your cockpit and you have a primary and a backup system that really makes it pretty difficult to become "lost" these days. Add a phone that can back up the other gadget, and you're multiple levels of failures deep before you're in any sort of trouble where you need to land "right now" and sort things out.
Have you talked about the phrase "Climb, confess, comply" yet with the instructor? There's always help available aloft, even for a lost pilot. Get some altitude, call a controller, and they'll have you set a squawk and they'll find ya. Later number four or five of backup.
Don't sweat the flight log sheet. You'll get to where you can do those easily (but never as fast as the gadgetry can calculate them) and that'll be your basis for *believing* the numbers the gadgets spit out, as you spot check them and adjust the gadget routing to take you over some nice landmarks to reference to make sure you're going where you want to be going.
Here's an even funnier tip. There's usually airports along the way. If you get totally lost, just land and "re-combobulate". There's a few stories of people wandering into FBOs and saying, "so where the hell am I?!" Not a lot of them, but again... Still a valid method of dealing with "lostness". Haha. Layer five or six now of things that'll get you "unlost".
Oh... Solo. Don't make a huge deal about when it needs to happen on some imaginary timeline. It'll happen when you're ready to fly around the pattern safely. Your confidence will probably go up a number of notches at that point, too.
You're doing fine. Just relax and enjoy a bit. The airplane will happily take you places without ten pounds of flight log paperwork on board. All you gotta do is get the basics of navigation into your head, and unfortunately, doing a pile of flight logs is the means to that end.
