big cross country!

I did my "big cross-country" today! One of the "aeronautical experience" requirements of the private pilot certificate is to do a solo cross-country trip of at least 150 nautical miles, involving two stops at tower-controlled airports. After scrubbing on Friday due to thunderstorms, I did it today. I think it went quite well!

There were some troubles! After happily taking off from the airport I set about calling the flight service station on the radio to activate my flight plan. But nobody responded. After a couple tries with both radios, the FSS guy came back saying, "Aircraft in the Baton Rouge area, I am receiving a carrier but no signal." Not wanting to proceed without a working radio, I turned back towards Hammond. But then I figured it out: the squelch setting on the intercom had been turned all the way off, so although the radio was transmitting, the microphone wasn't activating! Evidently the person using the airplane before me had been unusually thorough in turning off the individual pieces of avionics. After figuring that out, it was clear sailing on the communication front.

As a side effect, I got to circle around LIGO a few times.

Nearing Baton Rouge, the approach controllers vectored me in, giving me headings to fly. I landed following an incoming Regional Jet.

The slow climb out of BTR, over the refinery and the river right by downtown and the big highway bridge provided a very nice view.

I took my old hand-held GPS (purchased in 1998!) receiver along for the ride in order to record my flight path. Afterwards I had to dig up a computer that actually has a serial port, and to compile some old software to talk to the GPS. Anyway, after some perl scripting and some annoying XML-kludging, I present you with my flight path on Google maps!

I'm up to 35.6 total hours, including 4.7 hours solo cross-country. Next week I'll do a flight to Stennis to surpass the required 5 hours solo x/c.