The Good, The Bad, and the (just plane) Weird
I apologize for being a day late and a dollar short on this post. Since the beginning of April, I have been to Virginia, bought a house, returned to San Diego, worked a lot, went to Honolulu, worked a lot, and finally drug myself home last night. Whew!!! Anyway, you can thank United Airlines for missing my post deadline. Like K, I haven't been flying too long, so most of my (mis)adventures are already written up. I'll just give you a brief synopsis and a link to the previous post in case you missed it.
The good: My best flight so far has probably been my trip to Las Vegas. This is what flying is about. I was able to to use the airplane as a form of transportation to get from Point A to Point B, do some great desert flying, practice my navigation, etc. This definitely improved my confidence as a pilot.
The bad: Flying into KPSP on my long solo cross country. The original post is here, but that is only a partial story. It was my early days of blogging and I was nervous about putting things up. As Paul Harvey says, here is the rest of the story (assuming you have read the original post). The controller called my final late because he was shooting the breeze on the tower control frequency with other pilots about the shiny jet at the hold short line (a Navy T-45). I could hear the whole conversation, but I couldn't get a word in edgewise to request my clearance to final. When he finally turned me to final (after overshooting), I banked to the left. As I turned, I spotted some very close traffic, too close in my book, that I previously hadn't seen due to our separate approaches to the runway. Had the controller not unnecessarily delayed my clearance to final, the separation would have been adequate. I immediately steepened my descent to gain vertical separation and called "N12345, Close Traffic" on the tower frequency. The tower controller immediately responded that I shouldn't be making unnecessary transmissions on his frequency. I finished the landing to make it legal for my logs, then cancelled my previous request to fly closed pattern and requested a straight out departure. I wasn't going to hang around that idiot's airspace any longer than I had to.
The just plane weird: I would have to say that my weirdest flight so far has been in The Crooked Indian. The radios didn't work right, the plane flew crooked, and I felt like I was leaning to the left the whole flight. I haven't flown that airplane since, which hasn't kept the Chief Photographer from hitting me in the head for other reasons, some of which may be my fault.
In other news, we are in the process of setting up our move back to the Old Dominion. The Chief Photographer picked out a great house with a nice view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, so she will be moving at the end of May. I will remain under SOCAL/LA Center airspace until mid-July, then I will head to Washington Center to begin grad school. I have found a nearby airport to rent airplanes when time and money allow, so I will be doing some sightseeing flights up and down the Shenandoah Valley. Additionally, the Chief Photographer finally agreed that I could buy my very own airplane. That's the good news. The bad news is that I have to wait until I am out of graduate school and employed again before I can buy it. You can't win them all, but I'm going to start keeping a closer eye on airplane prices.
Cheers,
BC
The good: My best flight so far has probably been my trip to Las Vegas. This is what flying is about. I was able to to use the airplane as a form of transportation to get from Point A to Point B, do some great desert flying, practice my navigation, etc. This definitely improved my confidence as a pilot.
The bad: Flying into KPSP on my long solo cross country. The original post is here, but that is only a partial story. It was my early days of blogging and I was nervous about putting things up. As Paul Harvey says, here is the rest of the story (assuming you have read the original post). The controller called my final late because he was shooting the breeze on the tower control frequency with other pilots about the shiny jet at the hold short line (a Navy T-45). I could hear the whole conversation, but I couldn't get a word in edgewise to request my clearance to final. When he finally turned me to final (after overshooting), I banked to the left. As I turned, I spotted some very close traffic, too close in my book, that I previously hadn't seen due to our separate approaches to the runway. Had the controller not unnecessarily delayed my clearance to final, the separation would have been adequate. I immediately steepened my descent to gain vertical separation and called "N12345, Close Traffic" on the tower frequency. The tower controller immediately responded that I shouldn't be making unnecessary transmissions on his frequency. I finished the landing to make it legal for my logs, then cancelled my previous request to fly closed pattern and requested a straight out departure. I wasn't going to hang around that idiot's airspace any longer than I had to.
The just plane weird: I would have to say that my weirdest flight so far has been in The Crooked Indian. The radios didn't work right, the plane flew crooked, and I felt like I was leaning to the left the whole flight. I haven't flown that airplane since, which hasn't kept the Chief Photographer from hitting me in the head for other reasons, some of which may be my fault.
In other news, we are in the process of setting up our move back to the Old Dominion. The Chief Photographer picked out a great house with a nice view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, so she will be moving at the end of May. I will remain under SOCAL/LA Center airspace until mid-July, then I will head to Washington Center to begin grad school. I have found a nearby airport to rent airplanes when time and money allow, so I will be doing some sightseeing flights up and down the Shenandoah Valley. Additionally, the Chief Photographer finally agreed that I could buy my very own airplane. That's the good news. The bad news is that I have to wait until I am out of graduate school and employed again before I can buy it. You can't win them all, but I'm going to start keeping a closer eye on airplane prices.
Cheers,
BC
posted by Big Country at 2:17 PM
1 Comments:
Congratulations on the house and the future aircraft purchase! :)
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