A big part of my father's day today involved flying...
Jeanie and I flew up to visit her Mom and Dad today.
This was my first significant cross country flight since I resumed flying a little over a year ago.
I spent part of yesterday doing the flight planning and studying up on filing/opening/closing a flight plan. I also focused on reviewing radio procedures and cross country navigation.
We left around 11:30. The trip to McRae was pretty easy - we flew direct to the Alma VOR, and then direct to McRae. There is an NDB at McRae which made things even easier. We had originally filed for 6500 feet, but ended up having to climb to 8500 feet to stay legal, given that the bases of the cumulus were right at 6000 feet, and the tops were around 7500. Flight time was 68 minutes and the air was really smooth at altitude.
Jeanie is a great navigator. Today was the first time she ever acted as my co-pilot / navigator, and she did a fantastic job. I did learn one good lesson - ground references that might work really well at 2000 feet - things like towers and roads, don't work so well at altitude.
Jeanie's dad met us a McRae and drove us back to their place, where we had a delicious lunch with Jeanie's parents, her aunt Margie, and her cousin Judy.
After lunch, I hooked up their new DSL modem, and after getting the high speed connection working, removed Norton anti-virus and replaced it with Avast, and installed a bunch of Windows ME updates.
The flight home was more challenging. The trip back to Alma was okay, but I did not do as good a job writing out the times/landmarks for the way home, so the navigation was more challenging. Flying an outbound radial is more challenging too - it shouldn't be, but we ended up about 15 miles north of where we should have been. Unfortunately, there aren't any good navaids right here, and the Archer I rent has only one VOR, so getting a cross fix is really challenging. The Archer does have a GPS, but it is really old and small, and doesn't really help in navigation. To add an extra layer of challenge, right as we got near the coast, the ceiling lowered to 2500 feet, and got somewhat threatening, which made things a bit stressful for me. There is a prohibited area near the home airport to the north, and a class C airspace to the southeast, so there isn't much room for error, especially when you can only fly at 2000 - which is below the ceiling for both the prohibited area and the class C airspace. The trip home was closer to 85 minutes. The one highlight of the trip back was a super smooth on-the-centerline landing in gusty conditions with a cross wind.
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Posted by David at June 18, 2006 09:21 PM