Building Experience – Week 9 – 4/27/2024
Luke P -
After my first cross country flight my instructor and I did a few more cross countries together to help me get a handle on everything before sending me on my own. During that time I also buillt the time for my night experience requirements. I thought doing pattern work and landings at night was quite fun, and surprisingly the quality of my landings didn’t decrease drastically at night. The scary part was the night cross country. The route was Flagstaff to Payson to Cottonwood and back to Flagstaff. It was a really quiet flight, but it was uncomfortable not being able to see the terrain underneath you. Unlike the day time you don’t a a good visual reference to how high you are off the ground, instead, over the unpopulated areas you look down and it’s just an ocean of black. Descending into Payson wasn’t a normal descent because the Mogollon rim is in the way. As I said, you can’t really seee the ground when you’re flying at night, so if you didn’t plan ahead, you could easily smack into the Mogollon rim instead of descending properly into Payson. Next was Cottonwood, landing was fine, but taking off was pretty memorable. I know from the landscape that there is a hill off the end of the runway that we would be climbing towards. Unfortunately, it’s practically invisible at night so the entire time we were climbing out I was stressing looking at the gps to make sure that we were outclimbing the terrain. It ended up fine, but it definitely gave me a sense of the dangers night flying poses.
After I was done with those, I began flying to other airports on my own. It can be a little lonely, but it was fun, it made me feel like a lot more of a pilot. I would say my most challenging solo was between here, Falcon Field (in Mesa), and Sedona. I hadn’t been to Falcon or Sedona so I didn’t have any past experiences to reference. Flacon Field is probably the busiest General Aviation airport in Arizona, so much so that the day I flew there they had two Tower frequencies in use and a Ground Frequency. The communication aspect of Falcon is a little tricky because you have to respond quickly or else you’ll get cut off. There’s also a lot of student traffic there so there are some slow talkers that take up radio space. It was all fine though, I was just really hot sitting on the runway waiting for my clearance. Sedona carries a reputation with it that it’s a really difficult airport. It is a little trickier but I think the reputation that it carries is a little overblown. I actually didn’t have a huge struggle with it. That last cross country was a really good experience because it made me use a lot of the training that I had been given.
Comments:
All viewpoints are welcome but profane, threatening, disrespectful, or harassing comments will not be tolerated and are subject to moderation up to, and including, full deletion.