Saturday, April 9, 2011

A Beautiful Bumpy Day

The weather was perfect today. Hardly a cloud in the sky, temperatures above 70 degrees, and no wind. Unfortunately, a nice warm day like this brings convective turbulence, so it was still very bumpy. Luckily, this lesson was very short.

I started by tracking outbound from the Clarksburg VOR. Then my instructor had me pinpoint my exact location using the Morgantown VOR. Then I had to figure out my distance from the Morgantown VOR by flying 90 degrees to the course and timing my time between radials and using a formula to calculate time and distance to the station. I did pretty well the first time, so he didn't have me do it again.

Next, I flew a DME arc 18nm around the Morgantown VOR, successfully. Then since everything was done, we headed back to Clarksburg. I was hoping I would get to shoot a nice fancy ILS approach, however, there was traffic inbound and I had to stay at 4000 feet as long as possible and then drop it fast down to the airport. It was a slightly difficult landing due to the turbulence, but I still put it down nice and smooth.

This lesson only took about 48 minutes, which saved me some money.

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