First, short cross country
The plan was to make short cross country flight today that would introduce me to some pilotage and radio navigation. The route was simple and short: IA24 (Green Castle) -> IOW (VOR) -> 8C4 (Tipton) -> IA24. Just 66 nm and should be done in less than 45 minutes. The weather was fully ‘cooperating’. Terry was glad because of the amount of water in the air I couldn’t see further than 7-8 miles so I couldn’t spot next point on the route from previous one (which he says is easily done in good conditions) so I actually had to do some pilotage.
First leg – tracking VOR was quite simple. I had some problems finding it though. It turned out that I was exactly over it and at the very moment when ‘I should be just over it’ crossed my mind the flag flipped from TO to FROM.
Second leg started as VOR tracking but just about 3 miles from it my instructor flipped the radio and asked ‘and now what’? so the rest of this leg was done the traditional way – meaning I was lost most of the time hoping that the road I see is actual.y the road I think I see. It turned out quite OK. Mostly because I simply kept flying the course I had when I was tracking the VOR.
After touch and go at Tipton it started to be a little bit more serious. There was no VOR to track, visibility wasn’t that great and I was flying over the terrain I didn’t know. As you can see from the track it wasn’t even closely similar to straight line it was supposed to be. But I managed to find home.
What is interesting in this lesson though is number of mistakes I did. Probably the biggest were landings. Both were done way to fast. I forgot to compensate for calm winds and touched down in about 1/3rd of the runway in Tipton and about half way down the one ad home. It was bad. Really bad, and I feel like and idiot for doing it this way. As they say – that will be probably last time I did this. I’m not saying that I won’t do hot landings, I’m just saying that I will remember how should I do this when the wind is calm.
Second mistake was.. fuel management. No, not that kind of mismanagement you usually hear off. We took off with full tanks and had plenty of fuel to do this cross country seven times. What I did is I totally forgot about switching tanks. Again – nothing really happen, or was even close to happen – we burned probably around 9, maybe 10 gallons from left tank (which has 24 gallons usable). Not even close to any problem. What bothers me though is that I totally forgot about this and has this been longer cross country I could be caught by surprise with one tank empty and no time to switch them there. And that’s not good. That’s very bad. I have to figure out how to remember about this during my next flights.
0.9h/0.0h inst : 2 to/ldg logged
39.4h/0.8h inst : 238 to/ldg total
