Dan’s Pilot Times

This past Saturday I had the opportunity to fly what I’ll call a mini cross country flight. My CFI and I didn’t have enough time to plan and fly a full cross country flight (greater than 50 nm away), but we didn’t want to waste the gorgeous weather. So, we decided to do a 5-leg circle around some of the local airports to give me a flavor of the techniques and skills necessary for a true cross-country flight. Our plan was to depart Westosha and head over to Racine, then East Troy, Lake Lawn, Grand Geneva, and back to Westosha. All in all, it would be over 80 nm round trip.

The trip was a lot of fun, and was really my first flight where I got to navigate to places other than Burlington (which is very close to Westosha). There was a fair amount of wind that day (as Todd even notes in his blog)…so the landings were very challening since all these airports didn’t have many choices that avoided some sort of crosswind. I was quite satisfied, though, that every landing was very smooth (even with the crosswinds). We used general visual navigation and dead reckoning techniques and didn’t need to utilize VOR radials for such short flights. We’ll utilize that sort of navigation on my next true cross country which should hopefully be next weekend.

I’m off to various parts of the country for work this week and although I’ll be in planes a lot, I won’t have the opportunity to pilot (unless United and the FAA change their rules). I can’t wait until next week!

This lesson I logged 1.7 hours.