Three hours of ground school today left me with a headache and sore eyes. Man, the numbers on those charts are tough for an old guy, especially if the "class room" is not extremely well lit. That's behind me, so I can start some cross country work.Rob and I went over flight planning using navigation by dead reckoning. "Dead reckoning is navigation solely by means of computations based on time, airspeed, distance and direction." Yea, that's from the book. You can see why it puts me to sleep. We also went over some more weather, or how and where to get weather information. Now I can plan a short trip. And that's my job. I've got to prepare a flight plan to and from Crystal River (CGC). Next week we get to fly there. The airport at Crystal River has one paved and one grass runway. I'm hoping the wind is out of the north so we can land on the grass.
I'm going to practice a bit more on Thursday. Cross country next week. I'm sure I'll get in some more ground school before taking longer flights and learn about the other navigational methods available to me. It's funny to use dead reckoning in a plane equipped with a state of the art GPS system. But, them's the rules.
Posts
5 comments:
My next lesson will be my first cross-country flight, too. My instructor asked me to pick the destinations so, I'm thinking of going up to Leesburg (LEE) and then Ocala (OCF) and back. I'm really looking forward to it.
My next flight is a cross-country as well...up to Lancaster PA (LNS). I'm almost hoping for rain on Friday so I have more time to plan!
But you'll be glad to know how to reckon deadly when that GPS dies! ;-)
Steve,
The 172 I'm flying has a Garmin 430 WAAS with traffic. If I lost the gps system, I would miss the traffic information the most. It spots planes you never see. My CFI was instructing before the 430s were installed. He thought it was a gimmick at first, now he hates to fly planes without traffic information.
I can certainly agree with that sentiment... no matter how hard I look there are still far too many planes I never see.
Post a Comment