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I spotted the airport, and since I knew I was supposed to overfly it, I turned to it and flew right over it. The first instance is a few miles north of KOZW. Sadly, I didn’t get to hear the end of the conversation since the controller told me to contact Detroit approach.Īs far as the ground track is concerned, you can see two places where I stopped flying current heading and instead flew toward the next checkpoint visually. It apparently was a slow day for Lansing approach as well, as I got to hear a controller chatting with a pilot of a skydiving plane about how fast the skydivers fell to the ground. The air calmed down enough that once trimmed, the plane more or less stayed at 3500 feet.
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It is a nice airport, and I wouldn’t mind stopping there in the future if the need arose.įlying back to Ann Arbor was the easy part of the trip. Maybe it was just the overcast that made people stay indoors. I did not notice anyone else around during the couple of minutes I spent on the ground taxiing and getting ready for the next leg. I didn’t stop by the FBO, so I have no idea how they are. Two plenty long runways for a 172 even on a hot day (5004x75 feet and 3197x75 feet). I suspect the wind turbines were built there because the area is windy. Since there were no thunderstorms in the area, I flew on fighting the updrafts. For whatever reason, it felt like I was flying in sizable thermals. The most difficult part was trying to stay at 2500 feet. Sure, it seems to get closer and closer to zero (which I assume is a good thing), but I can’t honestly say that I understand what the graph is saying. I can’t really draw any conclusions because…well, I don’t know what the graph is telling me. The CSV file says that the units are “fsd” - I have no idea what that means. Here’s the plot of the CDI deflection for this leg. As expected, it got easier the farther away from the station I got. It took about 2 minutes longer to get there than planned, but the wind turbines were easy to see from distance so no problems there.įollowing the VOR wasn’t difficult, but you can see in the ground track that I was meandering across it. My one and only checkpoint on this leg was mid way - the beginning of a wind turbine farm. I flew this leg by following the MBS VOR radial 248. The first four-ish and the last five-ish were spent climbing and descending, so really there was about 15 minutes of cruising. This equated to about 25 minutes of flying. There were no planes around except for me and the commuter jet. The whole time I was on the radio with Saginaw approach, I got to hear maybe 5 planes total. While I was on taxiway C, they got cleared to take off. ( FlightAware tells me that it was FLG3903 flight to KDTW.) My clearance was quickly followed by the tower instructing a commuter jet to hold short of 23 because of landing traffic - me! Somehow, it is very satisfying to see a real plane (CRJ-200) have to wait for little ol’ me to land.
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Right when I entered the downwind for runway 23, the tower cleared me to land. (Yes, I know, it is a westerly direction and the rule (FAR 91.159) says even thousand + 500, but the clouds were not high enough to fly at 4500 and the rule only applies 3000 AGL and above - the ground around these parts is 700-1000 feet MSL.) On the way to Saginaw, I was planning to go at 3500. Next time I’m using a VOR for any part of my planning, I’m going to check for any NOTAMs before I make it part of my plan - redoing portions of the plan is tedious and not fun. Thankfully, Salem VORTAC (SVM) is very close so I just used its radial 339 instead. However when I called up the FSS briefer, I found out that it was out of service. My checkpoint by I-69 (southwest of Flint) was supposed to be a I-69 and Pontiac VORTAC (PSI) radial 311 intersection. In my defense, the forecast winds were about 40 degrees off from reality during the first half of the flight. (Sadly, there’s no convenient zoom level that covers the entire track without excessive waste.)Īs you can see, I didn’t quite overfly all the checkpoints. Here’s the ground track (as recorded by the G1000) along with red dots for each of my checkpoints and a pink line connecting them. In case you don’t happen to have the Detroit sectional chart in front of you, this might help you visualize the scope of the flight. The plan was to fly KARB → KMBS → KAMN → KARB. A week ago (June 15), I went on my first solo cross country flight.