My Flight Journal

Sunday, January 11, 2004 4:32pm

Whew... 2.9 today. You guessed it, cross country.

The weather was beautifully clear, but cold and damn windy. Planned from SFB to Cross City (CTY) - about 114 miles. Took the R model 172 so it went quicker but not cheaper. I hit all my checkpoints within a couple of minutes so I was happy.

On the way back, as I'm climbing through 1000ft departing CTY, my instructor tells me to divert to Crystal River (CGC). So while I'm in the middle of my climb, I have to plot the new course and calculate the time and distance. I plotted one checkpoint between CTY and CGC, and based on that I was able to estimate the time to Crystal River and was only off by 1 minute. Which impressed the both of us given the crazy winds. Then of course I had to plot a whole new flight plan back to SFB from there. It's not so easy flying the airplane, looking out the windows and comparing it to the sectional (I wasn't using any radio navaids for the the trip back), and doing all the damn math to create a new flight plan. Oh yea, and he had me get flight following so I had to pay attention to the radio and answer occasionally.

On the really cool front, I picked up the ILS out of Sanford at 30 miles out, and flew the glide slope down from 5500ft all the way to the runway. Crosswinds were gusting to 18 - which made landing a little tricky. I just used 10degs of flaps and left some power in and flew it onto the runway. And greased it too, thank you very much. Which made me feel a lot better since my landing at CTY was about 10 ft high.


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Chapters:
  1. In the beginning   (pages 1 - 5)   6. Hurricane Season Begins   (pages 42 - 47)
  2. Pre-Solo   (pages 6 - 21)   7. Hurricane Season Ends   (pages 48 - 54)
  3. First Solo!   (pages 22 - 26)   8. Solo Cross-Countries   (pages 55 - 58)
  4. First Night XC   (pages 27 - 32)   9. Checkride!   (page 59)
  5. Longest Flight Yet   (pages 33 - 41)  
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