Now I am ready to go solo again … this means leaving the traffic pattern with landings at multiple airports. I’m a little worried about fitting all of this in the 3 hour window I have with the aircraft, but I will give it a try. Now just to be clear, a cross-country flight is not literally “across” the country. It is about navigation. So the requirement is that you must log a certain number of hours and on each flight there must be 50 nautical miles to one landing point AND one of the cross country flights must total 150 nautical miles and require 3 landings.

So my first solo was planned for March 23, 2008 and was to take me from Bedford, MA to New Bedford, MA to North Central, RI and then back home to Bedford. I did all my prefight planning, checked weather, filed a flight plan and thought this was going to be pretty straightforward. Think again ….

For each solo-cross country you must get an endorsement from an instructor. So that took about 20-30 minutes reviewing my plan and making sure I was thinking about the flight correctly. A suggestion was made for me to adjust my flight around the Providence airspace … which was a good idea which I then incorporated. So by the time I got to pre-flight the plane I was already an hour into my time. So be it …

I then took off and climbed to 2500 feet which was below the Boston Airspace and headed to New Bedford. It was beautiful, off to my left is Boston, the Harbor and just off to in the distance P-town and the Cape … I think I got a little caught up in the moment since I didn’t do a very good job of recording my times along the way for each of my checkpoints. I was definitely depending way too much on GPS, so I will have to work on that in the future.

I continued my flight over Norwood Airport and south to Taunton. Once I was within 10-15 miles of New Bedford, you could see Buzzards Bay straight ahead and there was the airport. Okay … call for conditions, check. Call the tower and request a landing for Cessna N6049G. Controller calls back and tells me to report when I am on a 3 mile right base to runway 32. I asked for him to repeat …. which he did …. and yikes …. think and look at the chart and see where you are now and where you want to be. Slow down and descend to traffic pattern altitude, good. At 3 miles I call the tower and they tell me I am “Number 1, Cleared to Land”. Power to 1700 RPM, 10 degrees of flaps, continue on base, turn to final, another 10 degrees of flaps, the winds are gusting pretty good, over the threshold followed by a very nice touchdown. Woo hoo !

I clear the runway … switch over to ground control and park the plane to take a deep breath and get organized. Unfortunately I look at the time and realize to North Central first and then back to Bedford, so I decide to head straight back to Bedford and try again on another day. Maybe I will book the plane a bit longer. I retraced my steps to Bedford and I was feeling pretty good about the day !!