Wednesday 21 July 2010

Last landing in the US



It had to happen eventually.
The usual coastal cloud layer was building up over Montgomery airport, I was coming from the West just in between San Diego class Bravo airspace and Gillespie Delta airspace, at 2900ft, cleared to land about 8 miles from touchdown (welcome to the States!). No way to get the runway in sight, being over the remote layer (it was thin and stable at 1400 to 1600ft) with a strong sun in front of me, and the controler put me on runway 28 R as there was some other airplanes in the pattern doing touch-and-goes 28 L.
Coming back VFR with a poor visibility, when we're cleared for runway 28L, we usually follow the freeway till it leads us to the stadium, turning point to intercept the final path on a 280° heading.
Today, I was on 28R with a well-equiped plane, so I loaded up the GPS ILS approach as a back-up and help for situational awareness and put the ILS frequency 111.7 into the two VOR/ILS instruments (which had been checked and were both current). 30° interception on the LOC, and a bit later on the glide to start the descent at a constant rate. I was doing 100kt on long final, reduced to 85 as I got closer and finally 75kt with 10° flaps on short final. I touched down on the runway markers which are what we aim for, but it doesn't always work that well. Pretty happy with the result.

Some figures from those 2 months 1/2 in the States:
Just over 50 flight hours,
10 different planes flown on a total of around 5500nm (10200km ; 6300 miles).
Lowest outside in flight temperature: about 0°C, highest outside in flight temperature: 47°C,
Longuest flight in a day: 700nm (1300km),
14 States visited (California, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, District of Columbia, New York State, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware).

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Salut,

Félicitation pour ton blog !!!

Je suis à la recherche d'une école de pilotage à san Diego, Ou as-tu fais la tienne ?

Merci ;-)

Mirco said...

Hi, i don't know if it is correct write here this but anyway...
I'm really interested in an hour building program in the USA.
What i want to do it's a mix between vacation and hour building, which means stay some days in a city before moving to another.
I suppose you weren't on a specific hour building program because you flew 50 hrs in 2 and half months (generally companies/flight schools don't give you more than 21 days to complete the program).
You found a flight school/company that didn't give you time limits or what?
Blue skies
Mirco

Golfcharlie232 said...

Hi Mirco,

No I wasn't on a hours building program. I was just renting Cessnas and Pipers in one of the thousands of flying clubs in the US. Simple as that.

Mirco said...

In this case could you hold the plane during the night?

Golfcharlie232 said...

Usually yes.

Mirco said...

Thanks a lot, i luckily found a flight school that has the program that i want.
I can rent one of their single-engine aircraft and it is as if I own the plane. I will pick my own routs and fly when and where I want.