Friday, June 8, 2012

Crossing the country.

Well lets see here, I did my first solo flight on the 18th of April which was the last time I updated the blog.  I guess this post will be a three for one!

June 8th, Maneuvers, solo's and cross country trips.

After my first solo flight I had one more flight exactly two weeks after that.  It was a pretty good flight all in all but nothing too amazing.  I won't go into great depth and detail of the flight.  We flew from Bolton(ktzr) to Madison County's airport (kuyf) did some maneuvers and three touch and goes and then back to Bolton for a full stop.  About an hour flight but nothing new.

Then about three weeks later we flew again on May 29th.  We took off and headed out towards Madison County airport, while on our climb out of Bolton Mike looks over and says ok we'll do a couple of touch and go's then it's all you again for your 2nd solo.  I did a couple of touch and go's and one full stop landing to go pick Mike up who was waiting on the ramp.  He got in and said he we have some time left, you want to fly up to Ohio State and use "Flight Following"?  Uh...yeah!

This was my first experience with a service called Flight Following.  It is a service provided by Air Traffic Control where they give you traffic alerts and other pertinent information while you're flying around. It's a pretty nice service considering were just a little plane flying around the Columbus area.  This was also my first experience flying to another towered airport and away from Bolton field.  Compared to Bolton field the Ohio State University Airport is pretty big.  After taking off from OSU we headed back to Bolton and called it a flight. 

June 8th

A car ride down 71S to Cincinnati from Columbus take around two hours. 

Now we've been trying to do this Cross Country trip for the previous two lessons, which turned into ground lessons as one day was IFR only flights and the other weather just wasn't good enough.  C'est la vie right.  I got to the airport early enough to eat some lunch at JP's bbq.  After that amazing lunch I got to planning the flight with the winds aloft from 3000' to 6000'. 

At first planning was a little confusing but I quickly got the hang of it.  Honestly "easy" on my part is an understatement of the amount of Math that goes into planning a flight.  If I had to calculate every single component of math to plan a flight I may just go crazy.  But thanks be to God for some one invented this computer called an e6b.  This manual computer will calculate any portion of your flight that you could ever want to know.  Now that being said every piece of information is on this little 6"x8" slide rule computer.  Now this is great and every thing and it takes tons of work out of planning a flight.  But....there's an app for that. Seriously...there is.

Flight following in Columbus wasn't really needed but it was fun to use.  As we got closer to Cincinnati today it was a blessing to have.  Lets just say that the traffic down in Cinnci is 10-20 times more than in the Columbus Area.  We landed at Lunken airport, where by the way P&G's and Kroger's aircraft are based, taxied around and got ready to leave as we taxied around to the same runway we landed on.  Flying back was great as Mike started to show me some navigational instruments.  It was a pretty short flight back and we lined up like we were doing an instrument approach to Runway 4.

It was a blast flying today and I couldn't stop from smiling from ear to ear I was having so much fun.  I'm now up 19 hours and there isn't a whole lot left to do as far as training goes.  We'll do a couple more cross country flights during the day and some at night, then I'll do just about the rest of the flying on my own.  I think that's what I'm most excited about is being able to do all the planning and flying on my own.  But even more so exciting after that is once I get my Pilot certificate I'll be able to take any one up with me, and that is just awesome to me!  I can't wait!!!

Oh and remember how I said it takes a little more than 2 hours to drive down to Cincinnati? 

We flew there and back in less than that time.

19 Hours in and a lifetime to learn!

2 comments:

  1. Congrats on your next 3 flights!
    Sounds like they all went well and you got lots more hours of flying experience under your belt! YAY!

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  2. Yeah I sure did. I can't wait to be able to grab Clarissa and fly out to see people on my own!

    ReplyDelete