After the weather looking a bit dodgy for most of the week, today I had PPL Lesson 32: Practice Cross Country Qualifier.
I did most of the planning the night before so when I got to the school I only really had to correct for the wind and put my heights and corrected headings in.
The gap in the weather was scheduled to last till 2pm so we got going quite quickly.
My instructor and I got the plane ready and then we headed to runway 21 to take off. I took off and headed to Olney, this is our normal start point for most navigation flights.
This would be the first time I have headed to another airfield to land so I was excited to see what it was like to land elsewhere.
The flight to Leicester was uneventful, I had to switch to Sywell and do my position report and let them know where I was going. Not much later I had to switch to Leicester which is a radio. This means that they cannot tell you what to do, they can only give you advice.
I did the standard overhead join and landed on runway 08 and taxied to park. We then had to go and pay for a landing which is something I am not used as they are included at Cranfield. The cost to land at Leicester is £12.
I did not stay here for long, maybe 15 minutes in total because I wanted to get back up and get on my to Gloucester. On this leg it was going to be around 55 minutes in total with a turning point at Northampton.
On this leg I needed to talk to Sywell, Brize Norton Radar and Gloucester. The most eventful part of this flight was talking to Brize Norton as I had never talked to radar controllers before. The main difference is that they give you a number to put in your transponder so that they can identify you, I was 3717 today. The thing you have to remember is to put the transponder to standby before changing and then putting it back to Alt.
I also had to pass an area of intense glider activity, but luckily there wasn’t many gliders out today, I was prepared to go around that area if I needed to. We hit a major problem when we got to Gloucester. There was grey skies, low clouds and poor visibility. My instructor asked me to do what I would normally do if he wasn’t here, I told him I would do a 180 and turn back to which he seemed happy with.
As he was with me he flew in a bit to show me what it was like to be in those conditions, it then started to snow, these conditions are most definitely not fun. I would have liked to land at Gloucester before doing it for real tomorrow but hey at least I saved the landing fee 🙂
My instructor then asked me after a while to plan a diversion to Cranfield, which I did with my protractor, ruler and CRP-5. My instructor told me that he was going to show me a much faster way.
The flight back to Cranfield was uneventful, we hit Woburn Town requested the join and was told to report downwind runway 21. From here I did a standard circuit, landed and then taxied to park.
The most important thing to remember when flying solo is to remember your checks to make sure that your plane is performing like you expect it to.
Tomorrows plan should the weather hold up is to do it again myself, I must admit I am excited!
