Trees Hurt!

Should have quit while I was ahead, but after taking a break to take the boys for ice cream, I decided to fly down towards Atlanta and try to land at a little airport near where a friend of mine lives. It's Mathis Airfield, a little private airport in Cumming, or maybe it's in Suwanee.

Took off from Dalton OK, and managed to find the airport:

One end of the runway is right over a cliff above a small lake, and there are trees all around the place. Plus it's clearly a lot smaller than Dalton, so I should have (1) done more research before the flight, or (2) aborted and found a larger airport nearby.

Instead, I circled the airport once to get a feel for it, then attempted to land. On the first try, I came in too high and knew I couldn't get on the runway so I powered up and aborted that attempt. Should have learned something from that, but instead I circled for another try.

My second attempt seemed about right, coming in to the end of the runway, narrowly seemed to miss some trees on the approach, but then when I tried to flare to land I floated a bit and before I knew it I was half-way down the strip. I should have aborted again, but I was tired and ready to be done with the flight so I jammed the plane down on the runway and stomped on the brakes.

Landing at about 70 knots though, it takes a while to stop. Apparently it takes a little more room to stop than what I had as I went off the end of the runway, through the grass, down a little hill and into some trees! Ouch!

One thing that really irks me about FSX is that after a crash it just reloads the flight, back to where you started (in this case, Dalton). There's no opportunity to review the flight, do an instant replay of the landing (such as it was) or really learn anything from it.

Sure, I learned the generally lessons (plan ahead and know when to land somewhere else), but I'd like to have rerun the landing and crash to see just how bad it was (and to get some pictures).

(update - did some post-crash research. Mathis has a runway that's 1800 feet long by 35 feet wide. Dalton is 5,496 feet long (3 times the length) and 100 feet wide (total area of concrete is about 10 times as large!). Since I normally use a third to a half of the runway at Dalton, it's no wonder I couldn't stay on this one. Maybe if I touched down perfectly at the very start of the runway, but not otherwise. Lesson learned.)