A 200 Mile Solo Flight

It’s been nearly five hours since I landed, and I haven’t managed to successful think about anything but flying today.  Would you like to know about the latest requirement I crossed off in my flying lessons?

Everyone says that I’ll never forget my first solo flight.  They say it’s one of the greatest experiences in your entire life.  Yet each time I land, I find myself falling more and more in love with flying.

Today was no exception.

I woke up early to put together the finishing details of my flight plan on a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper – factoring details like wind direction and variations between magnetic headings and true headings.  I never really thought about these things before.  When you fly commercially, you just hop in the plane, watch a few movies, sip a few Cokes, and step out in the exact place where you want to be.

My first solo cross country flight of over 2 1/2 hours wasn’t so easy today.  I wasn’t allowed to use GPS, and you can be sure I didn’t have access to fancy equipment like autopilot or radars!

All I had were the flight plan I’d just built to give myself compass directions and estimated times, airport directories, and maps.  It was like flying years ago when pilots had nothing else to guide them.

I used the maps to get from point to point, studying rivers and mountains, roads and little towns.  The airport directories told me which radio frequency to use as I landed in each little town.  The trickiest part was factoring the wind into my flight.  You know how the wind pushes your kite along with it?  Wind does the same thing to a plane.  You can drift right off course and have no idea unless you prepare with a flight plan before you go (or today you can use tools in your plane that Martin made me promise not to even touch unless I was lost).

And I swear it wasn’t scary at all.

women in aviation

Just kidding.  I actually had a BLAST on my little adventure (although my face looks surprisingly red and blotchy!).  Unlike my solo flights at a large commercial airport where I had to wait in line behind two commercial airliners, I even remembered to open the vents before my nerves and I sweated to death.

See… not so bad.

cross country flight

I did manage to snap a few photos of my journey for you all to see.  

flying solo

edge of the mountains

small town America

My exams are coming up soon.  I have to fly back to a city with a tower (yikes!) for my written test and on another date, do a practical test in the sky and around the airplane on the ground with an examiner one-on-one.  Needless to say, I’m as nervous as heck.  

But first?  More solo flights, flights at night… and scariest of all:  flights with funny goggles that completely block my vision out the windows.

Meanwhile, I’m off to take a nap, which probably means dreams of maps and wind.  Does that ever happen to you?  Whatever you spend the most time doing in one day is all you can dream about as you sleep?