First of all, my brother was here. Just for a day though, he was at a conference in California and landed in Orlando around 10 after 3 connected flights from CA to Las Vegas to Dallas to Orlando.

First order of buisness: Go flying. (Excluding Lunch and Bestbuy.) Flew with him to Melbourne after a briefing and introduction to the aircraft. A little before takeoff a what I suspect a controlled forest fire was started 5 NM southwest of the airport which created a few problems for helicopter traffic, with the smoke rising to at least 3000′ right in the path of the preferred entrance/exit routes for the school aircraft. We kept our distance of course, but were close enough to take good pictures of the area on fire.

Melbourne tower but us on taxiway Kilo for out touch’n'go, which is north of and parallel to runway 9L (and 9R for that matter) to give way to a Piper Cherokee on final for 9L. Usually MLB dosen’t put helis on Kilo unless you announce you’re a student pilot. Just for treats.
Smooth flight, although we didn’t find any alligators at St. John River as I promised. Just not their season nor their part of the day.

Oh, and my roommate bought a Xbox 360 last night, so after I dropped my brother off at the airport for his flight home (after just 6 hours) I went and bought Gears of War. Yes I’ve played it before but only in splitscreen dual mode.

Lastly, I’ve got written exams coming up, another attempt at my JAA ATPL(H) GNAV and Flight Planning so no flights till those are over. Prolly not alot of posts either. I’ll post some of the pictures my brother took once he sends em over.

I flew 3 flights today, all VFR X-C for total of 4.1 hours.

First one was to the South, open farmside area with various ranches and such. First waypoint was supposed to be a ranch but I never found it. Neither did I find the private airstrip that was supposed to be next to it. Maybe, I dunno, maybe because I had to use a 10-15 years old map with handdrewn points of interest? It’s supposed to look like a JAAA VFR chart but they seriously need to update this. Hell, there’s a runway missing on one of the airports! Flew few circles around the area before I gave up and vent on towards Tedford, small private strip that I like to use, but I know the owner of that land isn’t so happy with people coming into land just like that.
Second one was to the west, over to Orlando, always fun to fly over urban areas. Except finding forced landing areas in case of an emergency. Went first to an abandoned private field halfways towards Orlando, called RYBOLT. Pain to find, cause the once paved runways are all grass now, but the runways themselves are slightly discolored so I managed to find the field and touch down. From there I went to Orlando Executive, Class D airport in downtown Orlando. Fairly smooth, but just on the other side of the highway was Orlando International, Class B airport. Big whitebodies commercial airliners, you get the idea. Wanted to stay the hell away from their airspace.

Those flights were both solo. The 3rd was dual, night flight. Getting my hours up to be certified to do solo nightflight. Went down to Melbourne following the I-4 and back same way. Made an ILS approach to TIX runway 36 but we lost the glideslope just after the Outer Marker so we used the PAPI to guide us in. The same thing happened to Mick, my roommate, during a checkride, most likely the same aircraft.

I think I’ve never flown for as long in one single day so I’m not surprised being a bit tired. I’ve no flights tomorrow so I can sleep out, but my bro is dropping by for a day on Wednesday and I’m planning to take him for a flight. Take him down to Melbourne so I can log it as C-X and then to training area Alpha, see if we can spot an alligator on the riverbank or something.

PS: It was damn close to freezing this night. Temps were around 4° C at sunrise. 1st day in FL that I had to wear a jacket all day long (plus it was freezing up where I was flying).  I put on a hat due to weather. You that met me last xmas know what hat. One of the instructor claimed that he liked said hat on me. I like that hat.

I’ve flown 3 flights since I got back to the US. One ILS Approach dual under the hood to KMLB which is about 27 NM South of KTIX, 1 X-C VFR solo also to KMLB, and today, one X-C VFR to New Smyrna, KEVB, 32 miles NNW from my airport. The last 2 VFR Flights were done without any major planning, but navigating with reference to terrain features only and using GPS as reference. I haven’t done this before with the exception of local flights to and from training areas but I’ve had no problems with the navigation in those flights.

I’m putting my logged hours into Excel to get a better overview what I need to complete for my JAA CPL checkride. Not too far out now.

I finally made the solo flight to Orlando Executive today. 1.3 hours flight, flying N1525F again. I followed Interstate 50 from Titusville all the way into Orlando, but the radio was quite busy so it took me some time (and a 360) to get in proper touch with Tower. I was worried about entering the airfield, with light winds around 040, I’d go straight in the way of departing traffic of runway 07. And airspace class B surrounding the airport wasn’t helping either. But besides some hesitation in communication, everything went smoothly as I joined left downwind and followed some fixedwing (skywagon?) and was,then put down as #3 after a Cessna on long final. There was some more fixedwing behind me so I had to make a nice final doing about 50-600 knots, flare and just touch the runway with the skids just in time before Tower told me to depart without delay. Rest of flight was smooth and uneventful. Besides some slow guy taxiing to park in front of me back at KTIX. Can’t blame him though.

Check out this video I bumped into on YouTube, it’s a 1st person view of simulated engine failure followed by a fulldown landing with the engine idling throughout the exercise. It’s performed on my training airport (Spot 2 in 36 configuration) using one of the helis I fly. It’s a good insight into some of the stuff I do for training, although in my case we recover in hover instead of making a fulldown landing. Bit I’ve done those a few times before. (Clarification: I had nothing to do with this particular video)

I finally managed to fly another GPS approach for 09 in KTIX yesterday, after a couple of failed attempts. Nothing extraordinary. Todays flight, x-c to Orlando Executive (KORL) was canceled due to low cloud base - I’ll give it another shot tomorrow afternoon but the forecast isn’t looking so good. I’ve never been to that airport and I always get a bit nervous, with unfamiliar runways and procedures and all…I need more experience with dealing with those.

I’ll post some other stuff later today. I believe Chuck Norris is about to kick some nazis around on TV.

N20938, IFR ship. Practice area 4, shared with R22 N7031G as listed below. Dual flight, w. foggles for majority of flight time. Heading tracking and scanning. Rate 1 turns. Steep turns. IFR Autorotation entrance (wind @ 040, heading 180, mistake turning right misjudging wind as coming from 360). Attempted a GPS Approach to runway 09 back to KTIX but was unable to establish communication with Orlando Approach for vectors.

And a minor rave: Damn I hate those old E2 compasses. And I rarely use the term hate, those things really get on my nerve for some reason. I’d prefer…what are they called, those that display the entire 360 dial and spin it so your current heading is on top of the dial, a vertical card compass? If anyone knows please leave a comment.

Edit: VFR flight in the afternoon canceled due to rain and vis.

I was surprisingly fresh and focused after staying up all night watching dots on my clock and anime. Focused, sharp, impatient even but not too much. It’s a state of mind I like even if I’m serious by heart, at such a moment a smile is not far away. We flew another instrument flight today, which I wouln’t get too deep into, I’ll explain later. It was mostly flying in circles without looking outside, fly all with the instruments onboard. We tried contacting Orlando Approach which handles most of the organized traffic in order to make a special training approach back to the airport (a GPS one for the record). Due to the coverage of the Approach, it’s not uncommon at all hearing only their side of an conversation, with other aircraft being so far away from us and all.

There was a R22 from our school in our training area, that announced they were gonna make the same type of approach about 15 minutes before we did. 31G was its callsign I believe. After lengthy time of checklists and radio mess, we tried contacting Approach but within the minute we heard them respond to 31G, but we never heard the 31G side of the chat. About 15 minutes after we tried to contact the Approach, they were still sorting out 31G for their approach and hadn’t even started dealing with us. At the time we heard “*sigh* OK, 31 Golf, Orlando approach, What exactly do you want to do?” we figured out that either we said screw it and went back the normal usual way. We were shutting down when 31G finally came in for landing. What the hell they did remains a mistery to me.

I plan to break this blog up to two categories. Like my friend/admin says those stories are meant to come from the skies themselves, so from now on I’ll sort my posts into three categories. Mindless raving, flight, and combines (still working on the names of those). The previous posts have mostly been of the Mindless (or somewhat mindful) category. My next post will be flight. This is pretty much mixed, ’cause it’s alot of yada yada in it but it’s about flying. So stay tuned!