Sight Seeing Tour

Got off work a little early today to do some yard work but decided to get some flying in while the house was empty. I took off from Dalton again, still in the Skyhawk, and headed up to Chattanooga like last time, but on this trip I used the Chattanooga airport as a landmark and turned north at that point. I flew up to the Watts Bar nuclear plant, which is modeled in 3D in the simulator. Flew around the cooling towers and headed back down river to see if the Aquarium was modeled. It's not, which seems odd. Also, only one of about five bridges were even shown, and it appeared to be laying in the water. Maybe if I had a faster machine with better video I could crank up the display settings and it would show a lot more. Not fair to judge it on a laptop with just the Intel built-in video chip set.

Anyway, from downtown Chattanooga I picked up Lookout Mountain and flew parallel to that heading south. I had checked Google maps earlier and was looking for a break in the ridge as a reference point at which I turned ESE, towards Calhoun. I was trying to find "the pocket", a camping area between two ridges where I've ridden my bike a few times. After one false lead, I did finally manage to find it, then flew over Calhoun, crossed the interstate, and turned north, keeping the interstate in sight on one side and using the mountain range to the east to judge my latitude. Fort Mountain and the range around there is pretty easy to recognize if you're from here.

When I got far enough north, I started looking for and found the Dalton airport. Almost flew right over it. Once I found the airport, I positioned myself south of it, and actually flew the correct traffic pattern to land. You have to come around to the south, then fly parallel to the runway heading NW, fly out a couple of miles and do a 180 coming back SE to line up with the runway and land. I remember that much from the flight lessons I took years ago.

Altogether, this flight took me about an hour. I'm not sure I learned that much, although I did experiment with trimming out the plane so it flies level and straight without any control inputs. I think I improved the handling, but didn't make it perfect.

Of course, I did manage to fly my plan and to do some basic visual navigation using landmarks, so that's something. Not sure what the next test flight will involve, but I need to learn more about actually handling the plane. One thing I need to figure out is fuel mixture. On a Skyhawk, you don't just have a throttle control, but also a mixture control. At higher altitudes, you're suppose to "lean" the fuel/air mixture for better performance and gas millage. I'll have to study up on that.

I should also try for higher altitudes and do some stall recovery and that sort of thing. So far I don't think I've gone over 5000 feet (above sea level), which is only about 4000 feet about ground. You can still see the houses and trees and such at that altitude. The Skyhawk has a ceiling of 16,000 feet I believe, so I need to get up to 10,000 at least and play around where I've got some recovery room if I mess up.

I also need to read up on the simulator reality settings. I've got it at "easy" right now, but not sure what that means exactly, or what the other options are.

Well, I guess I should get to that yard work now.