BFT10 - waypoint navigation

[Rongor]

First I want to say thanks for this mission, its a good challenge to get you back into being more proficient with the CDU.

Today I flew this one almost flawlessly. Only at the very first waypoint, I arrived too early. Sometimes its difficult to determine from when the 5 minutes timer is supposed to start. At the beginning of the instructor telling me the coordinates, at the time he states I have 5 minutes left or when he is done with all his advice?

Besides that confusion, which cost me being on time at the first waypoint, everything else in that mission went perfectly. So as usual when everything but a single item goes well, I expected to receive a Q- rating. Instead:
The last task is to navigate to Batumi by TACAN, which again confused me as I wasn't certain what kind of trigger would test me using the TACAN at all. I wasn't that far north from Batumi, I could've and would've called Batumi ATC regularly at this point to get the vectoring to the approach segment. instead I followed to the TACAN's 75° radial to enter the traffic pattern's downwind leg (as we learned to do some missions earlier) and then called Batumi tower while in the extended downwind. Did a lefthand U turn into extended final rwy at 2500 ft coming from 230 kts as usual in these missions. Instructor never complained. After landing I parked at the tanker as usual and shut down.
After calling sierra delta complete, instructor was very happy with my shutdown procedure. Then it got weird: He didn't - as usual - continue with my ratings for each segment of the PO. Instead the "You failed.." message played, which we usually only get to hear when the instructor cancels the PO mid flight.

Not sure if this was connected to my TACAN use (instructor wasn't that specific about what he would expect me to do with it, so I used it with best intention), only mentioned it just in case...

 

[Sabre-TLA]

The timer starts when he is finished his dialogue so I recommend looking at the clock and adding five minutes and set that as your time on target.  There is some leeway so you don't have to be at the point in space at the exact time but within 30 seconds or so I think.  The Q trigger is about 3nm from the overfly point so you need to be within that trigger zone within the 5 minutes from getting the instructions. 

You do have to ensure you have the correct location as some folks enter the wrong grid coordinates and end up heading in the wrong direction.  There is a humvee placed at the correct position on the map if you want to check your coordinates.

For the TACAN check we do test to see if it is setup correctly.  If not you will get a message like "You did not setup your TACAN correctly!  You need to set the TACAN to T/R and select TCN on the NMSP."

If you didn't hear that message then you likely had the TACAN setup correctly.

Usually there is a message when you do something that fails the mission so if you can post a trk file if it happens again that would be helpful in figuring out if there is a bug or just something went wonky on that flight attempt.  The practice mission triggers are identical so you could try that and see if you get the same result.