With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

closed pattern, Morristown

2007 January 23 21:21

I spent an hour and a half today doing patterns at Morristown. I've done some cross-country flights recently, and I realized that while my landings were Ok, my approaches were sort of lousy. When updating my log book on Sunday, I realized this was because I hadn't done any pattern work since October. So 10 take-offs and landings today. I tempered my tendency to come in high and fast, so now that's better. I made two pretty good approaches after which I was able to turn off the runway on the very first taxiway, which is about 1000 feet from the threshold.

This last Saturday was my second solo cross-country, and my last daytime solo cross-country in my flight training. It was Loooong. I flew a round trip from Morristown to Chattanooga, stopping at Knoxville on the way back. Lots of little problems, including fighting with the VOR to come back. For some reason, I can navigate to any airport except Morristown's.

A couple of other things: There's a fairly nice article on Wikipedia about airport runways and their markings.

There seems to be a new site with digitized Sectional charts. I have a subscription to Aeroplanner.com, and that's what I used, but this new site, Skyvector, is interesting. It allows you to set links to go to a particular airport, which is neat (see the airport links above), and it has a nifty linking page that has instructions for simple links and a form to construct complicated ones.

Oh, and for those working on their licenses or you already have yours, check out duats. It's a site that provides the same services as flight services stations; pre-flight briefings and filing flight plans and stuff. The really cool thing about it is that it can fill in most of the details on the flight plan form for you, based on your information and a flight profile. It has routing software that will format your route for you, based on a routing that it picks or you can type it in explicitly. I used this to file the flight plan for my solo cross-country Saturday, and it was really slick.

Lots more ideas for blog posts stacked up, but I've been busy at work...so there should be new stuff soon.