1st Comm Cross Country and more approaches

Wow! I haven't posted in the longest time.....I'm really falling behind here! So I will give you an update on what I've done for the last week and a half...last Saturday the 21st I completed my first Cross Country flight toward my Commercial License. I flew from Norwood, MA to Farmingdale, NY on Long Island. It took me about 1 hour and 40 mins to get there as we had a pretty stiff headwind, and then it took us just over 1 hour to get back with the help of that tail wind and flying direct. It was a pretty uneventful flight, but exciting nonetheless to fly down there dodging clouds on my way down and then dodging them once we made it almost all the way back. Below I included some pictures of the CT coastline, the Long Island Sound, and Long Island. I flew down there at 4,500 feet and at 5,500 feet on the way back. Just to give a little perspective from how high those pictures were taken. That was 3.6 hours completed of the 120 hours I need for my Commercial License. Whew! A long way to go!

So far this week I have flown 3.7 hours in 2 days. I went in to Horizon Aviation on Wednesday night after work. Got there just before 6 and went up shortly after getting there and shot an approach into Providence, New Bedford, Plymouth, and back in Norwood. Shooting 4 approaches in 1 flight is certainly draining! I didn't even handle the radio calls yet! That is going to definitely start to push me to my limits. But, with practice I will be able to handle all of it like a pro. Today, Thursday Feb 26th I was back in at Horizon Aviation at 8AM after only leaving there 12 hours earlier! It almost seemed I never left! We got in N172SJ and taxiied over to the runup area next to Runway 17 where we were going to take off from. Except, during our runup of the airplane we discovered that the left magneto had failed - we couldn't take off. So we scrapped the flight and taxiied the airplane back to the hangar so it could be brought to maintenance to be repaired. But, we hopped in another plane and took it up so I could at least get one flight in. We didn't go to Martha's Vineyard as we had originally planned with stops along the way in Providence and New Bedford to fly the approaches there. So, we just flew to Providence and did the 23 VOR DME approach and the 23 ILS approach with the missed approach procedure included to fly the hold pattern. Then we flew over to New Bedford and flew the Runway 23 Back Course Localizer, landed and took right back off again back up to Norwood to fly the Runway 35 Localizer in and circled to land on Runway 17. All in all it was a better day and I'm improving, but there are definitely a few things I need to work on. All of which I am about to cover as part of my homework tonight. I might get some actual instrument flying in tomorrow since it looks like the clouds will be low enough! That will be a nice change!

(You can click on the pictures below to see the full size picture)