Flight turned out to be exactly 3 hours, 275 nautical miles, and 13 landings!
What the map doesn’t show is that we flew right through 2 really busy airspaces. Right in the middle there, just below the lower green line, is DFW. We went right over it! And just to the right of that you can see Love Field too. First time I’ve had commercial airliners flying under me!
Can’t really get good pictures from a cell phone, but I couldn’t not take one or two at least.
Love Field hiding in the dark shadow just right of the tall DFW buildings.
You can only really tell its downtown by looking for the blue and green building lights right about center.
Just ahead of us is the DFW Airport!
Each one of those little islands of light in the dark are 2 DFW terminals, with a freeway running left-right between them.
Probably the biggest lesson of my first cross-country night flight is that airports are hard to see from the side! Thank goodness for GPS.
We flew down to Terrell and did a stop-and-go, and then flew right across DFW to Alliance and did more landings there. Their runway is huge, and also very well lit, which made it pretty easy. When a flock of 767s showed up we went out to Decatur and did a few more there on a not-large and not-well-lit runway for quite a different experience. Then came home and did a few more at Denton to get ourselves to 3 hours. 9:11PM to 12:11AM!
Was definitely a good first experience with night flying. Looking forward to when we do more night flying for the instrument-flying training!
Got a couple of videos and pictures of my first solo from my instructor.
He’s done this a number of times before, but I imagine at least the first few times you send a student off on their own it must be a little nerve wracking to watch.
Here are the videos of me taking off and then coming back! We have two runways at Denton and the larger closer one is closed for re-paving this month, so I’m off on the smaller one in the distance. Don’t worry, I’m well clear of all those dirt piles and construction trucks. 🙂
And off into the sky I go!Silky smooth landing…
There’s a tradition in aviation of cutting off a student’s shirt tails after their first solo. Back in “the day” most training aircraft had seats front-and-back rather than side-by-side, and the student sat in front. The instructor would tug on the student’s shirt tails to get their attention so they could give them instructions via hand signal. Cutting off the student’s shirt tail became a tradition that meant that the student was ready to fly on their own without the instructor tugging on them all the time.
Considering how much more I’ve learned just in the few days since then, I’m not sure that tradition wasn’t a bit premature! 😀
Bye bye shirt tails! N2112G is now officially my favorite plane to fly. It was a beautiful night to fly. 100% would do again, if you can’t tell by my grin.
And on top of all that it was instructor Nathan’s birthday! So we sent him off to have a birthday dinner and I helped one of other instructors push all the planes back in, all with my back hangin’ out since I left my other shirt in the car. 😀
And what did I do next? Went to see a movie with my buddy Bradley, who is learning to fly at a different school and had a big test the next morning. We needed a brain break, and Deadpool & Wolverine provided it!
The shirt I picked was one that I had brought home from my recent trip to Seattle to help clean out my grandfather’s apartment after he passed. The colors remind me of him, and I figured if I’m going to have parts of a shirt framed and hanging on my wall I might as well have two memories out of it! Grandpa spent almost his entire career working at Boeing and worked in different areas on various planes. I brought home most every memento that he had collected. The day before my solo, on my way out for that day’s flight I stopped and got the mail and got some items Mom had found and sent me. I had tossed them into my flight bag, and forgot to take them out. So these items went with me on my solo, as well as my next solo the next morning!
Grandpa had a collection of these sorts of things, presumably from events he went to. Other than the 777, I don’t actually know if he was involved in these specific programs or if he just went to the events, or maybe just bought them in the gift shop, I really don’t know! I picked a couple to show here because they’re from the year I was born, which seemed cool. 100th 767 on July 24th 1984, the 600th 747 on July 27th 1984, and the rollout of the first 737-300 January 17 1984, as well as a 777 pin, which was a program I know he worked on.
In other flying news, yesterday I flew to Ardmore Oklahoma and back, which is about 45 minutes one-way. We’re in the phase of training where we’re learning about how to plan and execute long cross-country trips. Pretty fun, and plenty more to learn!
So last night was my first time flying a plane all by myself! That flight is one where you just take off, go around, land again, and do that twice more.
And lucky enough for me the plane was available again this morning early, so after a couple hours of sleep and pushing it back out of the hanger, I’m off again!
This aircraft seems to be missing something…
Seems weird not to have someone sitting in the right seat! Plane actually feels pretty roomy this way!
Gonna make some circles
So for my first flight away from the airport by myself I’m just flying over the nearby lake Ray Roberts and the rural area on the north side. Just going to do some practice maneuvers, try and draw some shapes in the sky! Before I start though I needed to snap a picture. It’d be way to easy to just cruise and enjoy the view, but I gotta practice!
Cruising back to the airport
Winds were a little weird today, so my circles were not a great success. Had some other traffic as well which forced me to abort a few of them. Good practice though, and tons of fun.
Really crappy circles. S-turn was good though.
Next up, on Friday, is a cross-country trip up north to Ardmore and back.
I haven’t posted about this yet because so far it’s absolutely boring going around in circles and no time to take pictures. Some statistics though:
I now have 34.4 hours of time flying over 23 flights. Minus the 1.7 today and the 0.9 yesterday means I had my first solo at 31.8 hours, after 22 flights with instructors.
I have now landed a plane 114 times. It took about a hundred before I was consistently okay.
I have flown 5 different aircraft across 3 different types.
I’ve flown with two different instructors, split about evenly between them.
I don’t have mileage count, that’s not something that really gets tracked. For reference though today’s flight was about 150 miles. I’m probably at about 2500-3000 miles flown, never getting more than 50mi from the airport.
Now I’m stuck to the ground until Friday morning, which means it’s time to get back to studying the books! So much yet to memorize.
