Homeward Bound

Time to leave the keys if I'm going to get home in time for Christmas. I got off work early today, plan to take a furlough day tomorrow and thus don't have to go back until Monday. After I got home this afternoon I fired up the simulator and planned a flight from Key West to Tampa, a trip of just over 200 nautical miles.

So goodbye Margarita-ville. Here I am shortly after takeoff from Key West Int'l. I'm about 500 feet up and banking to the north. You can see those cruise ships still in port in the background.

Two-hundred nautical miles is a long way to fly, so I got a little interested in why nautical miles and regular miles are different, and why nautical miles per hour are called "knots" and not "nauts" or "nmph's" or something else.

One nautical mile per hour (1 knot) is the speed at which, traveling north or south on a meridian line, you will traverse 1 minute of latitude per hour. That works out to 1 knot = 1.151 miles per hour and thus one nautical mile = 1.151 regular miles.

Here I am about 50 nautical miles north of Key West. Up until this point the coast was just a thin line on the horizon but now I'm getting closer. That's Marco Island off to starboard.

Back to the lesson and the term "knot", which comes from the days of the British sailing fleet. They would measure speed by dropping a small wooden float thingy in the water attached to a line with knots tied in it at regular intervals.

While one sailor used an hour glass (or rather, a 28 second glass), another sailor let the line pay out and counted the knots. If you counted 10 knots during that time period you were traveling 10 knots or 10 nautical miles per hour.

Later more advanced and modern measuring techniques and more accurate, but only slightly so, than the old sailors technique.

Further north, at about the half-way point, I made landfall over Sanibel Island (Ft. Meyers area). I probably should have flown more directly to land since I just got that new Florida scenery, which doesn't do much good over the ocean.

Now that I'm over land, we'll see how it looks. Recall that over Key West, at low altitude (below 1,000 feet), even the MegaScenery left something to be desired.

Fortunately, a little higher (like my 4,500 foot cruising altitude), everything looks great.

Flying over Sanibel, I looked down from my right-side window. I believe that's Sanctuary Golf Course, based on a post-flight check on Google Earth.

The rest of the flight north was either along the coast line or a bit east over land. I was using a VOR station south of Tampa to navigate by. It's about 30 miles south of my destination airport, so the plan was to fly directly to the VOR, and then use the 14 degree outbound radian to navigate from the VOR to my landing point.

Here I am flying past Sarasota Int'l. Based on the readings from my VOR equipment, I'd say the tower is down there at that airport. Just thirty more nautical miles and I'll be to Tampa and to Peter O. Knight airport.

Knight is just south of downtown Tampa and right on the bay. (in Google Earth, look at 27 54'56.87"N, 82 26'54.33"W). At about 20 miles out I started descending down to a thousand feet and making preparations for landing, including calling in my position and landing intentions on the Knight traffic channel. There's no air traffic control there, so I don't have to request permission to land, just announce what I plan to do to other air traffic in the area.

The landing went well, although you can tell from this tower-view image that I'm a little high. Fortunately I had plenty of runway to work with and good brakes.

This airport should make a good jumping off point for a quick trip back to Disney. I'm curious what it looks like with the MegaScenery installed and specifically whether Space Mountain is in the correct position.

Anyway, I'm 200 nautical miles closer to home at least. After the Disney over-flight I'm going to head north again, probably to the pan-handle somewhere (maybe Panama City), and then a couple of hops up to Atlanta before the final leg back to Dalton, probably on Christmas Eve.