Heading South

I've been busy and/or sick for the past week so my virtual Cessna has been stuck in Athens during that time. I suppose if you have to be virtually stuck somewhere, Athens is not a bad place. I finally got some projects finished, including installing a drop ceiling in one of our basements rooms, plus started feeling a bit better by Sunday afternoon so I decided to get out of Athens.

Rather than just flying back to Dalton, I opted to continue south and head to Jekyll Island, Georgia, where I've spent a week almost every summer for the past 16 years. The island is owned by the State of Georgia, so development is controlled and it feels like you're going back in time when you cross the bridge from the mainland.

This was going to be a longer flight than anything I've done before. It should take a good two hours from take-off to landing. I also decided that rather than going straight to Jekyll, I'd fly over Savannah first and see how well the historic district is rendered in FSX. So I did some research, got my VOR frequencies for Savannah and then Brunswick (Brunswick VOR is about 2 miles from the Jekyll Island airport), and then created a flight plan in FSX and prepared for take-off.

I would have preferred a nice sunny day for flying, but I'm still stuck on using the real-world weather feature in FSX. As a result, I had to deal with rain and a low cloud bank while taking off from Athens. Knowing that it would be difficult to capture screenshots while taking off, I turned on the flight recorder figuring I could go back later and take screen shots from the recording. That didn't work out though. The recording option in FSX doesn't actually record a video of your flight. Rather, it records your position in space, orientation, speed, etc. every second or half-second or however you set it to record. FSX then uses that data to recreate the flight, but sometimes odd things happen. In this case, when I went back to replay the flight, the weather was nice, not raining. The take-off was accurate, but I didn't bother to take screen shots since the weather was wrong.

I had also decided to take off from runway 27, which would put me on a course to fly almost right over Sanford Stadium. On the real take-off, it was far too cloudy and rainy to really see anything. I flew over the city and then turned south-east and continued climbing to about 9,000 feet to get above the cloud cover. Even in the video, with sunny weather, I couldn't find any recognizable buildings in Athens. Too bad.

I was a good 200 nautical miles from Savannah, so it was a while before I picked up their VOR station. Once I did, I found I was pretty much on the right bearing. There was a wind blowing north or north-east which kept pushing me a bit off course, but that's not hard to adjust for. Most of the flight was just above the tops of the clouds and looked about like this:

As I got close to Savannah, I started feeling ill again (runny nose, etc.) so I skipped my planned fly-over of the historic district and instead just angled southward and tried to tune in the Brunswick VOR. I couldn't pick it up at first, which seemed odd given that I was only about 60 miles out at that point, but I did pick it up eventually. I probably could have found it regardless. I've been to Jekyll enough to recognize the shape of the island.

As I approached the island, I dropped through a cloud layer to find out I was almost right over it. As with other parts of Georgia, the ground scenery seems to be sort of generic, with nothing actually recognizable to be seen. I did however manage to see a lovely sunset before landing:

I circled the island, hoping to actually spot something interesting, but without success. As I came back around the north end I lined up on the runway for my final approach. I had a pretty good glide-slope, but the cross wind kept pushing me way off the runway. You can tell from this shot that my wings aren't level. I had to do a lot of banking left and right to get lined up correctly in the windy conditions.

After all the work I put into lining up on the runway, I decided at the last minute that I was too low and was going to touch-down in the grass just short of the runway. The Jekyll Airport has a landing light system that I've not learned how to use yet. In hindsight, and after watching the video of the landing, I realized that I was fine and just panicked a bit. The result of my error was that I gunned the engine just as my rear wheels were touching down on the runway. That caused me to bounce back into the air forcing me to cut throttle and land again. Not pretty.

As with the take-off, I had the video recorder running so I could take my screenshots off the video and not be distracted during the landing itself. Another thing I've noticed about videos is that the skip and stutter a bit, probably due to the sample rate not being high enough. In the video, I seemed to come down a good bit harder than in the actual landing. In fact, at the end of the video a warning popped up saying that the aircraft was over-stressed. Since I didn't get that warning during or after the actual landing, I'm assuming the plane is OK to fly the next leg of my journey, which will probably take me down to Florida.

This was my longest flight to date, taking about 2 hours to complete. At some point, I'm going to need to move up to a faster plane. The Beechcraft Baron I flew to Hunstville would have made this trip in just one hour.

Hopefully I'll get some more flight time in over the Thanksgiving holiday. I plan to do some touch-and-go landing practice at Jekyll though before continuing on.