Orlando to West Palm

I mostly spent this afternoon doing chores around the house. Got the basement floor mopped four times in preparation for sealing. I also installed a new doorbell out front for the wife, cooked dinner, and picked the Christmas tree up after it fell over this evening. We've got a ten foot tree and I think our stand might be a little small for that.

Anyway, after dark I found myself with a little time and decided to leave Orlando and continue my journey south. For my destination, I selected West Palm Beach. I've been there for scuba diving a number of times plus it makes a nice jumping off point if one were to want to fly east, say to the Bahamas.

I switched back to real world weather, which was cloudy per weather.com and loaded up the sim for an afternoon takeoff. I forgot to contact the tower and request clearance, but no matter. Soon I was airborne and heading south. Here's a view of Orlando International as I pass just to the east at about 5,000 feet:

Continuing south I managed to get the plane perfectly trimmed out straight and level at 5,000 feet and about 95 knots. My flight plan would take me almost due south from Orlando to Lake Okeechobee. There's a VOR on the southeastern shore that I was using to navigate to and which I would also use to fly outbound from to West Palm.

As I flew south, I realized that the sun was setting pretty quick. I forget it's winter. I had planned to land around dusk, but it looks like it'll be a night landing. It'll take me about an hour to fly to the lake and then 15-20 minutes to fly east to the airport. I did take advantage of the sunset to get some nice pictures:

Here's a neat view looking west with the sunset visible through the cockpit. You can't really tell from this angle, but one oddity on this flight was that my path took me almost directly over the line between MegaScenery Earth photoreal scenery to my left and the default fairly random scenery to my right.

A little while later as I approached the northern shore of the lake it started getting a lot cloudier and the sun got down on the horizon. The effect made for a nice purplish sky.

In this next shot, you can sort of see the north end of the lake under the cloud bank as the sun goes down. Not a nice day for getting a good view of the whole lake, which is huge.

The direct path south to the VOR would have taken me over the lake, but since I knew my final destination was on the east coast, I opted to fly around the eastern edge of the lake. I dialed the VOR gauge to 87 degrees outbound and waited for the needle to line up (which happens when I cross radian 87 from the VOR). I then banked to the left and made some adjustments to line up on that radian. My destination airport would be 25 miles outbound on that course.

As I flew eastward it started getting pretty dark and I started descending. I have also noticed on this trip that while FSX sometimes displays text on screen to indicate other aircraft (type, altitude, distance), even when you can't physically see the other plane, that doesn't always seem to be the case.

The skies around West Palm were more crowded that even Orlando and I spotted the wingtip lights of several planes that were not otherwise identified by FSX. That got me worried and a little paranoid about mid-air collisions so I started scanning the skies a lot more to make sure I was clear.

Anyway, I found the airport easily enough and got on the radio. Some airports aren't really controlled so instead of requesting clearance to land you just announce your intention to land so other airplanes in the area will know where you are and what you're doing. In FSX all of this is selected from menus and then, in a nice pilot voice that you can select from the options menus, you announce your call sign, distance and direction from the airport, altitude, and what you're going to do (inbound to a land on runway 26 left) for example.

I then got my airspeed down to about 75 knots and my altitude down to 1,000 feet and started flying the pattern. As I turned on final approach I found the runway dead ahead. Excellent! Then I noticed that my heading was 330 degrees, not 260 degrees, so I was lined up on the wrong runway. Dang! I throttled up, gained altitude, and banked off to the right to put a little more distance between me and the airport so I could line up correctly.

This time my turn put me a little off to the right but at least approaching the correct runway. I adjusted the throttle to set my descent rate and banked left and right to get lined up correctly. This was one of my better landings except that I'm still have trouble getting directly lined up down the center of the runway. Not sure how well you can see in this shot because it's so dark, but I'm flared out just right for touchdown:

Anyway, time for some sleep. I'll probably stay in West Palm this week looking for the dock where we'd leave from on scuba trips and just generally scouting out the area and maybe doing some more touch-and-go practice.

Then I think I'll head east and check out the islands...