My Flight Journal

Thursday, February 19, 2004 10:52pm

Chalk off another 2.2.

I flew with a new instructor today. My regular CFI is out of town for a couple weeks and put me in touch with this guy. I've had my solo x-country planned for a month now, but haven't been able to fly it yet. So I decided to fly the thing dual and I'll fly it solo next time. The plan was to fly over to Massey Ranch (X50), up to St. Aug (SGJ), then back to SFB. I took out of work a couple hours early so we could at least get to St. Aug. before it got too dark. I didn't mind flying back in the dark, I've done that enough times already.

I met the new guy a little early so we could go over the plan and talk some before blasting off. We ended up talking much too long and wound up launching an hour later than I planned. I made it to X50 before dark, but that's only about a 10 minute flight. It was plenty dark not long after that. I had to transit Daytona's Class C, so I called them up and they had me follow the interstate through their airspace - pretty easy way to navigate. I was planning to get flight following after they were done with me, but after leaving their airspace they handed me off to approach which stayed with me (or vice versa, whatever) all the way to St. Aug. Thought that was pretty cool.

Got to St. Aug and asked for a touch and go. The controller squeezed me in between a Seneca in front and a Hawker jet trying to fly up my ass. While I was on final the controller said, "just make it a low approach". Great, I wanted to at least touch the runway. I flew the 65kt descent past the threshold (I probably shouldn't have) before gunning it and hauling ass down the centerline at 100ft before finally popping up into a really swift climb. The instructor told me that when they do that you log it as a landing anyway. Fine by me.

Coming back to SFB was easy. My flight planning has been pretty much spot on, and the heading I worked out took us straight home. My landing left a lot to be desired. I think it was partially because I was landing on the narrowest runway when I'm used to landing on the widest at night. The ground met me before I was ready for it. Fooking triple-bouncer. I've NEVER done a triple before. That was a suckass way to end an almost flawless flight. At least I didn't break anything. That airplane is getting its 100-hour tomorrow anyway.

Oh yea, one small consolation was that we saw a very cool shooting star on that flight. It was right out in front of us, traveling very slowly and leaving a really bright trail.