Short Hop to Orlando

After several days of not being able to fly (Thanksgiving, long hours at work, other stuff that hand to get done around the house, etc.), I finally got to take to the skies a bit today. I decided that before continuing my journey, I'd take a short hop over to Orlando and fly around over Disney World. I took off from Titusville and headed west.

I actually used the Orlando VOR (112.20 MHz) located at Executive Airport which is just north of Orlando International for navigation, but I could have just as easily followed Highway 50:

It runs pretty much east/west from the coast in to Orlando. We've driven it before, although the toll road to the south is a bit faster.

Once again, I opted for real-world weather which (once again), was a mistake. Even shortly after take-off, I could tell it was a little too cloudy and hazy for sight-seeing, but I figured maybe I could stay under the cloud and see well enough when I got there.

The closer I got to Orlando though, the darker the clouds became. About 10 miles out, it became rather apparent that sight-seeing would be difficult and flying at low altitude might even be dangerous. I decided instead to follow the VOR signal straight in to Executive Airport and land.

After a refreshing break at the airport, I could either wait for nice weather, or just force nice weather since this is a simulation after all and do my sight seeing in a clear blue sky.

I've been playing around a bit with the air traffic control communication in FSX. I've not mastered it yet, but I was able to contact the airport, request clearance to land, and even land on the actual runway they cleared me for.

Clearance was for a direct approach to runway 15, but I decided to circle the airport and fly the usual landing pattern instead so I could get a better view of the lay of the land. As I made my turn to final approach I once again turned too sharply and found myself to the left of my correct line. I adjusted, but the wind was also trying to push me to the left so I never could get lined up perfectly. There was also a lot of turbulence, so my airspeed was jumping up and down, the altimeter needle was twitching up and down instead of descending smoothly and the nose of the plane kept jerking to the left and right.

Nevertheless, I flew her on in for a fairly smooth landing. Here I am crossing the runway threshold just 5-10 feet up in the air, ready to raise the nose and flare for landing:

You might notice that while my shadow seems to be over the runway, it's actually in the afternoon with the sun to my west (left), so this picture makes the landing look a little better than it really was.

Not that it wasn't smooth, but when they tell you to land on the line, I don't think this is what they meant:

Or at least, that's not the line they meant for me to land on. After touch down, I taxied back onto the runway and lined up on the center-line then announced that I was on the ground, switched frequencies to ground-control and got clearance to taxi to the parking area.

If I have time later today, I'll just set it on "fair weather" and try my Disney fly-over. The Magic Kingdom is about 18 miles southwest of this airport, so it shouldn't hard to find with good visibility.

Oh, one more note to self - don't forget to raise the flaps after takeoff when you use them. I flew all the way with 10-degree flaps, which kept my airspeed low and probably didn't do much for my gas mileage.