First, I had to find someone to fly with me. My friend Darren just passed his check ride, so I thought I would see if he wanted to go. Of course he did but was going out of town with his wife so he was unavailable. Next I asked my instructor if he would like some pancakes. He has an IFR student who has a 2 hour lesson every Saturday morning for the next 6 weeks, so he was out too. Next I called Calvin, our president and also a CFI in our flying club. He would have loved to go but had some vacation and wanted to go to Ohio. So I tried my friend Keith. He was up for it but wasn't up for getting up early in the morning. I convinced him it would be fun so he agreed. The problem for me was that I wouldn't get any flying done for me, but any excuse for flying was a good excuse. So we has a date set, June 28, wheels up no later than 8 AM (I reserved 3NB for 7 AM - 12 PM).
Everything was progressing nicely and I was really looking forward to visiting my friend Kyle and a good cross country flight on top of that. On Wednesday I got an email from Calvin where he asked if I still wanted to go eat some pancakes. I replied that I had made arrangements with Keith but would see if I could get out of it so I could fly left seat. I called Keith and he had forgotten about it so I was the new left seat guy.
I started my preflight on Friday afternoon at work. When I got home, I had some family things to do but as soon as we got Anna down, I started to get my outlook briefing from FSS. I was getting frustrated because I use several tools so I can get a big picture of what the weather is doing, plotted against my course. One of those tools is DUATS weather. DUATS was down for about 2 hours last night. By the time I got finished and felt comfortable, it was about 11:30 PM. My alarm was set for 5:45 AM. I could have used the sleep but I had to feel good about my planning. One of the reasons it took so long was the fact that I wanted to intercept VOR radials for all of my check points. Not just a single radial but a radial from 2 different VOR stations. I had spent a lot of time doing this.
5:45 AM and my alarm goes off. I get up and get ready and head out to the airport. During my briefing last night, the briefer told me that I would have a pretty strong wind to deal with today. The winds at my altitude were 200@34. If I had been able to fly straight to my destination, it would have only been 76 nm. Since I live in a very active class B airspace, I had to plan to fly under the 4000 foot outer shelf to stay out of the class B airspace. So my 76 nm route now was 98 nm with 5 way points for me to hit. I flew from TKI (McKinney) to HQZ (Mesquite) to (LNC) Lancaster to JWY (Midway) then as I flew straight to GDJ (Granbury), I picked up a couple of other reference points where I crossed I35W and the town of Godley. In a perfect world, I could have made this trip in about an hour. With a 34 knot wind to contend with, my calculated time was 1:22. I won't bore you with details but we did make it about 3 minutes late.
The pancakes were awesome as was the hospitality. My friend Kyle was out videotaping my landing. If I can get my hands on a copy of it, I may post it (depends on how good it looked). Calvin won some micro-fiber wipes that will help him keep his airplane clean and he also won a shirt that the gave to me. Time was flying by so we had to get out. I refueled and then went in to do my flight plan while Calvin watched the airplane. We said our goodbyes and prepared to head back to McKinney. Of course with my luck, when I got my winds aloft forecast, my 34 knot headwind I fought getting there was now only an 19 knot tailwind. Just my luck. As we were coming up on HQX, Calvin started the guessing game of when we thought we would touch down at McKinney. I could have won if I hadn't started to slow down so soon. My best guess was 11:57 AM and Calvin has straight up noon. I could have kept my speed up and just dropped down to 1,600 feet and slowed down once in the pattern but I slowed it down 5 miles out. Of course I was number 2 behind another Cessna and had to extend my downwind leg out past Hwy 380 so that ate up more time. All in all, we put it down at 12:00, as Calvin predicted.
I had such a good time and even though Calvin gave me some critiques of things I need to work on, it is going to be hard to wipe the smile off of my face for a while.
My video for this post is some cool shots of crosswind landings. Most people have a tough time with crosswind landings when they first get started. This is at the other extreme. These people shouldn't be able to land these things but when your skills are as honed as theirs are, you get amazing results. Then again, there is something to be said for the go around too.
My E-Logbook
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