Grey skies

Saturday was a great day! I flew my last cross-country flight. My first leg was from Norwood to Hartford-Brainard Airport. Pretty uneventful on the way down there, except for the first portion of the flight being rather bumpy. But, it wasn't anything I hadn't encountered before. Though, when I did get down into Hartford and picked up the ATIS information from the airport, it turns out there was an active TFR (temporary flight restriction) just east of the airport around a stadium over there with a 3 nautical mile radius up to 3000 feet. Thankfully I picked up this information while I was still 20 miles from the airport. After I realized my mistake of having the volume too low on the radios, I was on with Brainard Tower, and they were kind enough to give me headings around the restricted airspace and bring me right into Brainard Airport. No problems getting in there otherwise.

After I closed my flight plan and called my instructor to let him know I made it there safely. I jumped back into the plane and took off on my next leg - to Southbridge. Yes, Southbridge does have an airport!!! Haha. It's nothing too major but does have a 3501 foot runway sitting at the top of the hill in town next to the old dump. My parents, brother, and grandparents drove up there since it was only a few minutes from home to see me do my thing. My brother Nate took some real great shots of me around the airport and coming in to land. I'll try to post the link to those soon. I stopped long enough to give everyone a hug and show the plane off to them. They were very impressed. As I took off from Southbridge back to Norwood, I saw them waving at me...so with a quick couple flicks of the yoke side to side I gave them a wave with the wings of the plane. They caught on pretty quick and found it to be pretty funny. Other than that it was straight shot back to Norwood for a total of 2.4 hours of solo flight time. I'm a little short on solo time, so I will being taking the plane up next week to the practice area to get all my maneuvers down before I go for my final check rides. I'm 2 short weeks away. Time to get back to the books and study!