What a fun cross-country flight. I said it before, and I will say it again, it was so nice to get up there and fly the plane as it was designed. No maneuvers, no expected engine outs, and stress free landings. If you look closely at the first picture you will see 3 F-18's doing pattern work at Mirimar. This was a great site as I preflighted the aircraft. We had wheels up at Montgomery around 6:00PM and we clocked a total of 2.1 hours for the entire leg up to San Luis Obispo. The fourth picture down was the site as we descended from our cruising altitude of 10,500 to the pattern altitude at San Luis, 1,700. When we arrived at San Luis we had about an hour to kill before we could get back in the plane and fly back to Montgomery. Reason being, in order to log night flying hours for currency you can only do so an hour after the sun sets. In our case, the sun set at 7:54 PM. So, we headed up to the Spirit of St Louis, the restaurant located only 100 yards from the ramp that we park the airplane on. After dinner we headed back to preflight the aircraft and be on our way back to Montgomery.
Seeing as I have only logged 3 hours of night flying, the flight back was a lot of fun. Just as we flew the VFR corridor over LAX on the way up, we did the same on the way back. If you look at the night photos you will notice large areas of dark amongst a sea of lights, those would be the runways at LAX. It was also really neat to see the string of large jets on final for LAX, all stacked up off into the distance. As we departed south out of the L.A. area we notice the cloud banks had moved inland and it was apparent IMC conditions. About 30 minutes from our destination we tuned in weather at Montgomery and the clouds were reported as broken. So, we filed a pop-up IFR so we could fly an approach into Montgomery. However, as we approach the San Diego area the marine layer was beginning to dissipate and Montgomery was coming into visual range. At that point we cancelled IFR and flew the visual in.
,br>
No comments:
Post a Comment