So now I am feeling pretty confident flying solo within a 2 mile radius of my home airport. I continue this for a number of months and continue my instruction on navigation. This is where it really gets fun. Flying in rectangular patterns and doing take-offs and landings is one thing. But to find your way from Bedford, Mass to Sanford, Maine to Concord, NH is yet another. So the first thing is to spend many hours in the fall of 2007 learning the ins-and-outs of planning flights, understanding airspace, reading charts and getting a handle on weather.

During this time I also did some flying with my instructor at night, very different. It is absolutely beautiful and very calm … but trying to pick an airport out of all those lights from the low altitudes of a small single engine does take some getting use to, especially in the fairly congested greater Boston area. We also worked on procedures for being lost (which should never happen) and times when you get diverted from you intended airport.

My first night cross country Flight with my instructor Jake (I don’t want him to be nameless forever) was to Hyannis, Massachusetts. It was absolutely beautiful and we even ran into some snow flurries which had us scurrying to descend to an altitude that meets the VFR (visual flight rules) requirements for my planned rating.

The most challenging area of cross-country flying for me have been:

• Setting up for the traffic pattern and runway of my intended airport based on my position – you would think that seems pretty easy, but really understanding your position in this 3-dimensional space is not as easy as it may sound. Studying your magnetic your in reference to the runway positions has help me quite a bit. Did you know that runway numbers are actually magnetic headings ? Just add a zero to the end and there you have it. Runway 29 is magnetic heading 290 and runway 5 is heading 50. I was so surprised to hear this when I first started training. But it made so much sense.
• Flying into an uncontrolled airport. That basically means there is no Control Tower to talk to and tell you what to do. I have found that is very comforting when there is so much going on in that cockpit. Flying into the uncontrolled airport just means looking for everyone else all the time and making sure you really understand the active runway and the winds on the ground. Jake talked me through most of this an I was feeling much better. I even landed at a small airport in Maine that the re-fueling is self-service. Makes sense but I never thought that is how all these small airports operated.

Jake signs me off to go solo cross-country on February 23rd, 2008 !!!