I’ve gotten a few flights in since my last official debrief here, but the last one was worth some reflection. I planned a quick cross-country to two untowered airports nearby in a different area than I’m used to practicing over.
Since I’ve been toying with the idea of getting my instrument and commercial ratings, I felt like it was time to challenge myself a little more.
Flight misison
It had been a while since I did the special takeoffs and landings, so I created my mission the day before:
- Soft-field takeoff from my home field
- Short-field landing at airport one
- Short-field takeoff at airport one
- Soft-field landing at airport two
- Regular takeoff at airport two
- Regular landing at my home field
- Be more consistent checking and recording times and landmarks
- Practice untowered radio calls
- General practice flying to new fields
Along with the usual things I aim for:
- Stay within 50 ft on altitude
- Stay within 5 degrees on heading
- Stay within 5 kts on airspeed
Uneventful takeoff from home
Everything was great when I left my home field. For once, the winds were calm and it wasn’t 20 F cooler than it had been in weeks. There were no issues whatsoever leaving. The soft-field takeoff felt natural and holding it in ground effect this time, I finally felt that planes really do take some time to speed up and make adjustments.
After hitting my Vx speed, I set the plane to climb and put my flaps up. Nothing of note happened the whole way to the first airport. I got to see some new places I haven’t flown over. There’s a little game I like to play when ATC tells me there’s traffic close since I’m trying to get better at finding it faster. It’s working because I found the three other planes that were out.
Airport 1 was hard to see
I’ll admit that I’m spoiled to be able to fly from a well-trafficked, towered field. One that’s not hard to see at all from a distance. This first airport was really hard to see and it was a totally clear day.
I’d looked at the airport A/FD and on Google Earth, but I just couldn’t see it. ATC asked me if I had the field insight and for better or worse, I said yes. I knew it was right off my nose.
Eventually I saw it, but I couldn’t believe that was… it. It was much smaller than Google Earth led me to envision. I had to use every trick I knew to spot that airport. Looking for super cleared areas (which is hard to differentiate when you fly over farmland), trying to find any semblance of runway symbols, using my location on Foreflight to see how far out it should have been, etc.
By the time I found it, I was already entering the downwind leg. I had dropped to traffic pattern altitude, so the transition from looking to landing wasn’t jarring. I hit 80 kts on downwind, 10 flaps. 75 kts on base 20 flaps, 70 decreasing to 62-ish on final, 30 flaps. Came down a little hard on my touchdown point, put the flaps up, increased the backpressure, and braked.
Short-field landing complete. After that, I handled all the radio calls and taxied back to the hold-short line. Now it was time for the short-field takeoff. Made my radio calls, lined up on the runway. 10 flaps, brakes, max power, let brakes go, rotate almost immediately but smoothly, climb out steeply at Vy until 50 ft, lower the nose to get to Vx, flaps up.
Short-field takeoff complete. No real notes on that one so off to the next airport.
Airport 2 had other experiences
I was confident I could find this one. It was much bigger than Airport 1 and had three runways in different directions with one of them being over 7000 ft. I didn’t get back in touch with ATC for this short hop. I was already on the CTAF frequency and traffic was pretty sparse, yet responsive.
When I looked at it on Google Earth, it looked so much more vibrant even from way up high. I had a hard time finding this one too! In real life, the runways were browner than I expected and blended in more with the terrain. I actually had to overfly this field because I just could not see it.
There was other traffic landing there too and this threw me off. The winds changed because of course they did. So people were landing on runway 4 instead of runway 31 like I had planned for. The problem I had with runway 4 is that it had no taxiways. It was a weird configuration because runway 4 kind of overlaps runway 31.
So I stopped after landing and pulled up the airport diagram to see how to get… somewhere to regroup. I uneasily made my radio calls for taxiing around until I got to the parking area. I had to think for a while.
Taking off on runway 4 meant taxiing back across a couple taxiways, runway 31, and doing a taxi-back directly on runway 4. That sounded unnecessary and maybe a little unsafe for my skill level, so I decided to take off from runway 31.
The taxi to the end of runway 31 was incredibly long because 7000 ft isn’t short. During this taxi time, I reflected a little on the soft-field landing. Even though I was a little stressed, I did still manage to keep the nose wheel up until it wanted to go down.
Now I made my radio calls to do a regular takeoff and depart the field to head back home.
Getting back home
The rest of the flight was as uneventful as the beginning was. I did call Center when I departed Airport 2 and they handed me over to Approach who passed me to Tower. I was able to do a straight-in approach, which I very much enjoy, and greased the landing to the point where I didn’t really know I’d touched down.
Then Ground sent me to parking and I packed up for the day. That was a nice 2.1 hour flight!
My goal is to fly to three new states this year and I’ve already hit one. The weather has shut down a lot of the days I’d hoped to fly, so we’ll see how that goes.