{"id":1212,"date":"2006-01-20T22:07:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-21T03:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1212"},"modified":"2006-01-20T22:07:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-21T03:07:00","slug":"bluer-than-all-of-my-troubles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1212","title":{"rendered":"bluer than all of my troubles"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

* * * * * *<\/p>\n

Finally got up in the air today. Couldn’t have been a better day for flying. The air was glass-smooth at our cruising altitudes of 5500 and 4500 feet (depending on the leg of the trip). <\/p>\n

Mr. Parrish preflighted the plane while I completed the rest of the flight plan and called the Flight Service Station to file it. I can only plot so much out before the day of the trip–intended courses I can figure out but the actual heading of the plane (where I point the nose) depends heavily on the prevailing winds at altitude that day. Today up at cruising altitude the winds were 25 knots out of the south-southwest, so I added a correction factor to each of the legs of the flight.<\/p>\n

I didn’t get lost once. Used a combination of pilotage (flying by reference to landmarks on the ground) and dead reckoning (computing time & distance) and I always knew right where I was. My instructor said that if I do this well on my next XC (flying east through some pretty busy airspace) he’ll have no qualms about signing me off for my solo XC. My landings weren’t that great but they weren’t the focus of the flight. I’ll be soloing on Monday while Rick flies his XC with Mr. Parrish and I’ll practice copious numbers of landings then.<\/p>\n

Anson County Airport, our first stop, was a sleepy little airport just north of the South Carolina border. There were a smattering of small planes parked quietly on the ramp. We had the place to ourselves, really. Hickory, on the other hand, was a hotbed of activity. It’s controlled, so I had to call the tower and get vectors from them instead of just self-announcing what I wanted to do, as is usually the case. The controller, who sounded a bit overworked and flustered with the amount of traffic, put me in a long final for the main runway while she routed everyone else in sequence. Did a decent landing, turned off, got clearance to taxi back to the head of the active runway, did a mini-runup to check the magnetos, and waited at the hold-short line. And waited some more. Put the parking brake on and waited. After about 5 minutes I called her back, “86 Golf, holding for takeoff runway 24, departure to the east.” That seemed to jog her memory and she cleared me for takeoff.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Most of my pictures came out with a bluish tint. It wasn’t that blue up there. I think I had the wrong camera setting. In any case, Mr. Parrish took these on the last stage, as we were flying from Hickory to Sugar Valley. I had just crossed over I77 and knew where the airport was, so I was in a cruise descent. Workload was low so I fished out the camera.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My Christmas presents, the headset and the kneeboard, were absolutely invaluable for the flight. They made life 100 times easier.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On short final for runway 20 at Sugar Valley. I’m flying the plane; Mr. Parrish is in the right seat taking the pictures. We affectionately refer to the runway as “the toothpick.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Landing 20 is always fun. I’m coming over the 50-foot trees at the north end of the runway. You can see another plane heading up the taxiway toward the ramp on the right.<\/p>\n

All in all it was a good day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}