This seems familiar..

corey    Flying    

I took another trip to Fort Morgan, solo, this Sunday. I had scheduled a couple of hours with my instructor so that we could start reviewing for my pre-check ride check ride, and then my actual FAA check ride.

Turns out, I was missing .4 hours of solo cross country time. I didn’t realize that you needed a total of 5 hours of solo cross country time (plus 5 hours of non-solo cross country time), otherwise I would have tooled around a bit at Sterling when I went up there for my long cross country.

But, the weather was rapidly improving and I was able to jump over to N21180 and schedule a block of 3 hours for it. Hurriedly, I put together my flight plan (pretty much the same as my first solo cross country to Fort Morgan) and calculated winds aloft and all that fun stuff. 45 minutes later I was taxiing down to runway 11L.

It was pretty busy when I got clearance to “follow the two jets to runway 11L” and ended up playing chicken with another bizjet heading to parking. The ground controller was too busy reading an IFR clearance to tell him to “hold short of Alpha 12″ (which is where I was going) – when I was coming at him head on it was really hard to tell if he was moving or not; I wasn’t sure he had stopped at all!

Anyways, I quickly made my turn at A12 and proceeded to follow the two bizjets to the runway. After a somewhat uneventful soft field takeoff (darn it, I keep forgetting you have to steer with your brakes when you do those) I headed out to the north and east for those now familiar checkpoints.

Aaannndd .. it was a long flight. 2.1 hours later, I land back at Jeffco and all is well.

(Though I didn’t have my MP3 player with me, so I was fairly bored while flying around NE of Denver.. nothing around but me and a few cows).

Check out My Logbook for my latest flights.

On another note, I scored a 93 on my midterm for AES 1100 at Metro. Yay!

BJC->3V4->STK->BJC

corey    Flying    

On October 13th, I finally took my final cross country solo!

Taking off from Jeffco I headed over to Fort Morgan. The weather was great! Cool, clear skies, with a touch of haze. On arrival to Fort Morgan I overflew the airfield and checked out the wind sock: Ouch, an 80 degree crosswind for runway 14. Fort Morgan’s semi-sane automated unicom system said “Winds 220 at 9″. Knowing this, I decided that I would land with only 20 degrees of flaps and get a chance to work on my crosswind landings.

Well, my first approach was a bit too fast (on purpose, actually) and I ended up floating down half of the runway before executing a go-around. The second time around was much better, with crosswind correction almost right where it needed to be. Needless to say, I was a bit left of centerline when I touched down but only a small amount of side load was applied to the landing gear.

After touching down I did a 180-degree turnabout and taxied into the (small!) run-up area for runway 14, so that I could adjust my radios for 15 minute flight up to Sterling.

The wind at Sterling was pretty much right down the pipe. Since I had never been there before, I also overflew this airport to check out the runways. The AWOS told me the winds were about 10 knots, but since they were only 10 degrees off runway 33 it wouldn’t be any trouble. After a not-terrible landing, I taxi’ed back to beginning of runway 33 and setup my radios/GPS for my return trip home.

On the way back I took out my camera phone (shh!) and snapped a couple of pics. The quality sucks, so next time I go on a “trip” I’ll have to bring my digital camera.
flying/trips/13_Oct_05-01.jpg
flying/trips/13_Oct_05-04.jpg
And that was that. Than that having to do S-turns on final because the controller couldn’t figure out spacing, all went well. Now to get ready for my FAA Check Ride..

A New Hope

corey    News    

As you can see, today we have switched to a new blog software and theme.

WordPress is now the blogerizer of choice, at least as far as I am concerned. There’s tons of support for this software, unlike the other blog software I was using. Tons of plugins that folks have written that do tons of things. (Like that cool METAR plugin some guy wrote to get weather updates without even knowing he was tapping in to the FAA’s ADDS METAR service).

Anyways, I hope you like the new theme. It will be tweaked and changed a bit as I move through the template files and change things to my liking. What will stay is the graphic at the top, which is a picture Tim Samples took during my (second) first solo at 2V2.

(Though I might cycle the picture as I get others suitable for a spot of such prestige).

Enjoy!