Orange Worcester Norwood

Today was another cross-country flight with multiple stops. I got into Horizon Aviation in Norwood just after 1. Josh was just finishing up with his previous lesson. So I killed a couple minutes and took a look at the weather reports for the area to see what I could expect during our flight today. Nothing too exciting, just some lower clouds than I would like that brought our cruising altitude down from 4500 to 2500 feet. Today was my first day to call up and speak to a weather briefer. I procured a standard weather briefing and filed my first VFR flight plan. Which in this case, just entails giving the briefer all the details on your planned flight, the make/model/tail number of the plane you're flying, where you're flying to, how long it will take, and a proposed altitude with a few other details. He then put my plan on file, and I went out and preflighted the plane in time to have Josh come out and get in the plane and go. Except this time, before requesting taxi to the active runway, we also requested flight following service, which is provided by Boston ATC, where they literally, follow you on radar to your destination. This requires you to make a few extra radio calls, but they do provide you with helpful info like separation from other aircraft. While in air, we opened our flight plan with the Flight Service Station. This is done as a notification of your flight, so that if you were not to arrive for some reason or another and not report your arrival to the service station within 30 minutes of your planned arrival time, a search and rescue procedure will begin. So, there is some pretty important stuff to remember with that. Close your flight plan when you arrive at your destination!

We flew direct out to Orange without any problems. It took about 35 minutes to get out there. We stopped and stretched for a few minutes and called the Flight Service Station to close our flight plan. Though, right after we landed and got off the active runway another plane was making calls to land on the active runway right behind us........except, he landed in the oppoosite direction! He made radio calls to land the same way we did.....had this been about 1 minute later....he would have caused a head on collision with us landing in the opposite direction as he was stating! Pretty scary stuff when you think about it, but no problems occurred from his absentmindedness. We then took off and flew south over the Quabbin Reservoir and turned east on a projected heading toward Worcester. We landed in Worcester, and then took off using the GPS and headed back to Norwood. All of this, we did in just under 2 hours.

Next week I have a night cross-country and another day cross-country flight with my instructor - then my first solo cross-country will be planned for next Saturday!!!