ET's Info-Stew

Today I took off half a day from work to take advantage of the clear skies and light winds, and do some flying. I did 12 landings in the 1.2 hours, with a focus on short-field and soft-field landings. This effort is in preparation for my upcoming long cross country flights, where I may have to land on shorter and softer runways than I'm used to.

I have come up with the following four flight plans which take into account airspace and terrain, while minimizing distance flown as much as practical. Here are the flights from shortest to longest (CO Airports not including APA; flight time assumes 5 minutes of operations at each airport, not including fuel stops, and no wind; flight time and distance does not include detours to avoid airspace or terrain):

North
Distance: 213 NM
Flight time: 3.0 hrs
CO Airports: 9
States: Wyoming
Route: APA -> FTG -> 18V -> 11V -> GXY -> CYS -> FNL -> LMO -> BDU -> EIK -> BJC -> APA

I need to come up with a plan for visiting the 35 other Colorado airports I plan to visit (I left out DIA, Greeley-Weld since I've already been there, and Centennial which is my home airport), as well as one airport in each of the six states I want to visit. I picked up this neat booklet for free from my flying club that contains detailed information on all of the publicly accessible Colorado airports, which includes an overall map. Looking at the map it is easy to see that I can achieve my goal with four flights.

It's a new year, and I have an aviation-related resolution. I want to make a landing at all of the publicly-accessible Colorado airports east of the Rockies, and I also want to visit all of the bordering states east of the Rockies. The whole point is to expand my personal limits a little bit, and to have some fun.

Today I finished my bi-annual flight review with the local instructor, so now I'm able to get back in to flying for the fun of it. It was a good learning experience, as expected. Tom gave me some things to think about, particularly with having systems for memory. Acronyms are overused everywhere, but they are effective. For example, the 4F's for emergency engine failures: (Fly the plane, Find a suitable field, try to Fix the problem, and Fly a normal pattern).

I had planned to use today's scheduled flight time to continue preparation for my bi-annual flight review which I have scheduled for Wednesday. But after yesterday's flight I felt the practice would be overkill, so I decided to just cancel the flight. When I said this to Jenny she said that maybe the two of us could go up together. So I went through the task of coming of with and planning a flight. I decided to take somewhat of an ambitious approach and fly north up to the Greeley airport (KGXY).

Today I took up Cessna N6346D for 1.8 hours, which puts me at 61.4 hours of total flight time. Flying less than 30 average hours per year over the last 2.5 years is nothing to be proud of. Most casual pilots average 50-100 hours per year. Since leaving California I have only flown five times now, two of those with an instructor. As of today I have 12 days until I must complete my biannual flight review, and I still think I need to do some solo practice a couple more times first. But today was a good start.

I finally went flying again today for the first time in eight months. I did pattern work with an instructor for over an hour and after kicking off some rust I feel confident about flying again. Interestingly the airspeed indicator didn't work, but the instructor had me continue anyway as a learning experience. I really did get to feel the plane more that way. I was well coordinated most of the time, and on the last landing the instructor told me to "feel the ground effect in the elevator". I did and I greased the landing!

Finally, after over eight months, I climbed back into the left seat of a Cessna 172. Tom from Centennial Flyers checked me out in N6346D, a Cessna 172M. We did three circuits in the pattern, the first a touch-and-go, the second a go-around, and the third a power-off emergency simulation to a full stop. Both landings were pretty darn good. But I was a little rusty in some procedures. The go-around took me off guard and I neglected to apply full power, the #1 thing you need to do. The soft-field approach (which preceeded the go-around) wasn't really soft-field technique.

Today we made the flight to Harris Ranch, and we had fun doing it. The total flight time was 3 hours, which is my longest distance and duration round-trip flight. We had hamburgers at Harris Ranch, which were quite good. And we found our 100th cache! So this flight was something special for us. At $125 per hour the flight cost a pretty penny. Combined with the Cal Airways member dues, a balance I owed, and the food, the whole thing cost $500. So, it was a $500 hamburger.