Carolina Touring

Couple of flights to post about here. On Friday, I left Williamsburg Regional (Kingstree) and headed south to Lake Marion and Lake Moultre, just north-west of Monck's Corner, which is where we stay when we go on our annual family fishing trips to the Cooper River:

The Cooper is not displayed well in FSX. For one thing, it's blue. It should be brown. For another, it's surrounded by marshland, not farms and houses. But the shape of the river is not bad. The fork in the river just off my left wing is called "The T's", although as far as I can tell, there's only one "T".

From there, I flew on to Charleston, where the dock area had several of those tower/crane things like I found near Carter's Lake back home. They look accurate to a dockyard, unlike out in the middle of the forest.

I then headed up the coast and landed at Myrtle Beach International. Landing was pretty good, although off-center (again).

Today I headed north to Wilmington, North Carolina, home of the U.S.S. North Carolina Battleship from WWII. As a child, I recall visiting the ship (now a museum) and even did a report about it, maybe in middle school (or maybe 5th grade). I wasn't optimistic, but I was hoping it would be there. No such luck:
I did however located a couple of cargo ships and an oil tanker. I'm flying about 200-250' off the water here for a better look. You can see my shadow on the water just above me.

After not finding the battleship, I climbed up to 4500' and headed due west for about 80-90 nautical miles to Florence, South Carolina. Florence is where we stay when we got to a family reunion that occurs every September (I missed it this year, but wife and kids made it).

About 20 minutes out from landing, I looked around and my folks were standing there watching me. They had come over for dinner and snuck up on me. My Dad used to be a pilot, back in the 70's, and he hadn't seen my setup yet. They watched me fly in to Florence and land (no pressure, right?)

Fortunately, my landing was flawless. Definitely the best I've made in the Commander and one of the best, if not THE best, since I've been flying. My descent was smooth and steady, speed was just right, landed right on the center line (literally, nose wheel came down right on top of the line!), everything just perfect.

Then, after showing them the landing again in instant replay, I exited the flight without taking a screen shot. D'oh!!

Oh well, at least I didn't crash or anything. They had to have been impressed with that landing. It really was perfect.

Aside from these two flights, I've also been working on another project. I've transferred all of my paper flight log entries into an Excel spreadsheet. Same information, but now I can total it up and run totals for each type of plane I've flown. Some stats:

Total logged flight time: 72 hours, 53 minutes

Total landings: 156 (163 take-offs, but two of the "crashes" were software crashes only, not me actually crashing. Two others were me screwing around and maybe shouldn't have been logged flights anyway. The other three included two stalls before landing and one landing on too short a field with a roll-off into some trees after the end of the runway - none fatal)

Flight time by Aircraft Type:

Cessna Skylane - 34 hours, 9 minutes, 51 landings (one crash)

Cessna Skyhawk - 14 hours, 38 minutes, 39 landings (one crash)

Rockwell Commander - 12 hours, 1 minute, 19 landings

Piper Tomahawk - 5 hours, 47 minutes, 25 landings (one crash)

Aeronca Champ - 4 hours, 35 minutes, 15 landings (one crash - screwing around)

All Others - 1 hour, 43 minutes, 7 landings (one crash - screwing around)

Pretty interesting. I'll have to do something special for my 100th hour in the air!