Fly for Fun

Today's flight was not a lesson. Rather, I flew with my friend all day in his own personal plane. Even though I spent half the day as a passenger, and my friend is not a flight instructor, I still learned a lot.

The first thing we did was takeoff from Fairmont airport. Almost immediately I realized that my friends Cessna 150 was nowhere near as powerful as the 172s I was used to flying. He used up almost all of the runway and we still were dodging trees after takeoff. It took the plane about two minutes to climb above all the surrounding terrain. My friend then informed me that he was going to show me the difficult approach to Maley Field. Because I was in the plane and it had full fuel, he decided not to land at Maley and to just instead fly a low approach. In order to successfully land there, you have to clear the trees on top of a mountain by only about 10 feet, and then lower full flaps and put the plane into a full side-slip in order to descend quickly enough to get to the runway on the other side of the mountain. It's a very terrifying but fun approach. Here's the video I took of his approach:



Next we flew around for a good twenty minutes waiting for his friend to takeoff so that we could fly in formation to Moundsville, WV. After enjoying the smooth, morning air at 5500 feet, his friend finally took off and we began looking for his plane in the sky so that we could fly alongside him. We also tuned to 123.45, which is the pilot-to-pilot chatter frequency, and began coordinating our formation flying.

Formation flying works like this: you have one lead plane that flies the route, and the other planes are maneuvering planes who focus on flying with the lead plane. Since there were only two of us, his friend was the lead plane and we were the maneuvering plane. It was a pretty cool experience, being so close to another plane in the sky.

Once we got to Moundsville, we split up and both landed at Moundsville airport. It was a very small and quiet airport, and the FBO was deserted. After I used the bathroom, we got back in our planes and headed out again.

The takeoff from Moundsville was fun. It has a short runway which ends in a drop off into a deep valley. Upon takeoff, my friend held the plane in ground effect until the ground suddenly dropped out from underneath of us. It was a lot of fun. We then went and found his friend's house in Moundsville (which was the reason we came here in the first place). After taking some pictures of it, we headed over and took some pictures of the Hare Krishna Palace as well.

Then we split up again. They headed back, and we headed up towards Washington County airport in Pennsylvania to get some fuel. My friend lives and works in Washington, so he can get cheaper fuel there. While he was fueling up his plane, I called up Windwood Fly-In Resort to get permission to land at their private runway.

After meeting a few of the guys my friend works with at the airport, we headed out, and this time I was in the left seat. After we got into the air, we went to put in Windwood in his GPS. As it turns out, Windwood is not in the GPS. So I handed the controls over to him for a minute while I pulled up the map on the GPS and picked out a place where I though the airport was located, and we began tracking directly to that point.

At this point in the day, the air was no longer smooth. It had become slightly bumpy. After about twenty minutes of climbing, the plane was finally able to reach our cruising altitude of 5500 feet. We passed directly over Morgantown and got to see Cheat Lake and other great scenery. After another twenty minutes, we began flying in the Appalachian Mountains.

This was the first time I had ever flown over mountains this large and I learned something new. Typically with large mountains, you have something called mountain waves. Basically, the wind hits the mountains and blows upwards vertically. This is otherwise known as updrafts.

So while flying and maintaining a level attitude, the aircraft began climbing faster than the plane can climb under its own power. So I pitched down to maintain 5500. So the plane is flying downwards while the wind is blowing it upwards. What else happens when you fly downwards? An increase in speed. I had his plane doing speeds much faster than normal cruise speed for the plane. Since I don't know the technical name for flying in these updrafts, I am going to call it mountain surfing.

Upon reaching the point I had marked on the GPS, we looked around and did not see Windwood. So I turned and began flying down the valley keeping an eye out for the airport. Just when we were about to give up and just enter in the coordinates of the airport into the GPS manually, I spotted it directly underneath of us. So I pulled back the power, and began descending towards the runway. It was a very skinny runway, only about four feet wider than the planes wingspan, but I still lined up his plane and landed it just fine. My landing was a little bouncy because I had never flown a 150 before, but it worked out fine.

We parked the plane and walked up to the lodge and had a very delicious lunch at their aviation-themed restaurant. I had a Cessna, which was grilled chicken on a croissant roll, and he had a Lind Burger, a 1/3 pound cheeseburger.

We put some oil in the plane and I hopped back in the left seat again for the flight back to Fairmont. After a quick survey of the 3000 foot runway and the surrounding obstacles, we decided it would be best to take off from runway 24, because runway 6 had trees at the end that his plane would probably not be able to clear.

We began the takeoff and as we got about 3/4 of the way down the runway and still had not rotated, both him and I seriously considered aborting the takeoff. But he saw an opening and took the controls from me and at the end of the runway turned slightly left into an open field where we circled around and gained some altitude. We then had to fly down the valley a little before we could clear the mountain range and head back to Fairmont. Once we got high enough, we "surfed" along the mountain waves all the way back to Fairmont.

Flying today was a ton of fun. Not only did I enjoy flying all over WV and PA, but I also learned a lot, especially about low level flying and maneuvering (which is something I would never learn in part 141 training) and formation flying.