St. Louis

Changed my mind about touch-and-go practice, at least for now. I know how to land properly, my problem last time was just not preparing for the landing early enough. I slowed down some, but basically just "winged it" and thus was trying to control too many variables at once. For a good landing, you need to get the plane trimmed out to the proper landing speed early and get at the right altitude and on the right traffic pattern so you minimize the number of things you're having to do during the landing itself.

Anyway, I decided instead to fly north to St. Louis for some sight-seeing. It didn't look too far on the map, although I should have checked to see exactly how far it was. Turns out it was around 100 miles! I took off and established a cruising speed of 124 knots, which somehow (in spite of no apparent tail wind) translated into a ground speed of nearly 140 knots. Still trying to figure that one out. After 45 minutes, I made it and got some nice views of the arch and downtown area:

(click to enlarge)

After a couple of flyby's (but no gratuitous fly-through's), I used by GPS to get some information about an airport just on the other side of the river (in Illinois) and just a bit south of the arch. It's called St. Louis Downtown Airport (KCPS). The GPS had the runway information, elevation, radio frequencies, etc. Very cool!

I called in and got clearance to land, slowed down, entered the pattern and prepared for landing and actually landed pretty good, although still off-center. The only real problem was that I landed on the wrong runway! I had clearing to land on 30R (runway 30, right), but landed on 30L by mistake. The airport had two parallel runways, and I was so focused on making a good landing that I forgot about that and just landed on the nearest one. I wonder how much trouble that would get me in? None in FSX, fortunately.

Later, I took back off, did another fly-around of the city and headed south. I thought about switching to a smaller plane, like the Champ, and trying to fly through the arch, but that would have just been silly. The return trip was uneventful and as I got closer to my destination I went overboard with pre-landing preparedness. I descended and slowed down much earlier than necessary, adding a few minutes to my journey, but by the time I was in the pattern, I was trimmed out at 70 knots and had gone through my landing procedure in my mind several times. This landing was perfect, right on target, right down the middle, nice and soft with the nose up just a bit, etc.

I wish I had a picture of it, but after the landing and after checking the flight analysis (to log the time and distance, etc.), when I went back to do a replay of the landing FSX got one of those fatal errors and crashed out on me again. Grrrrr! I wonder if I added my system RAM if that would fix the problem?