VOR Athens

After the Dawgs defeated Auburn Saturday night I started missing Athens, where I spent 7 years of my life obtaining my higher education. Since I couldn't go there physically, I decided to at least fly there virtually. The problem with flying to Athens, compared to my only other long distance flight (Huntsville), is that there aren't enough good landmarks for navigation. You can head south-east from Dalton and hopefully fly over Lake Lanier, but then Athens is just somewhere south-east of the lake without any large mountains or rivers to guide you in. In the real world, maybe I could navigate by the major highways, but the graphics in FSX, at least on my laptop, aren't really good enough for that. In order to make sure I would arrive safely, I invested a little time in learning V.O.R. navigation.

VOR stands for Very high frequency Omni-directional Range and is a form of radio-navigation used by pilots. As I learn more about it I may post something more detailed, but basically you tune in the frequency of a known VOR station, say the one at the airport in Athens for example, and then navigate to that signal. It's more complicated than that, but let's move on.

I decided on an early morning flight with real weather. Take off from Dalton was complicated by a brisk wind, but the view of the sunrise over the north Georgia mountains was worth it:

With VOR you can set the frequency on the ground before you take off, but because it's VHF (very high frequency) it's strictly line-of-sight, so you can't actually pick up the signal until you gain some altitude. In this case, I picked up the signal at about 2,000 feet, by which time I was higher than any mountains between here and there.

For this trip, I actually used the FSX flight planner which suggested a cruise altitude of 5500 feet. Unfortunately there were a lot of clouds at that altitude, so I ended up climbing to about 7500 feet until the sun got a little higher and the clouds started burning off. Around Lake Lanier, I dropped back to my correct cruising altitude and took some nice images of the lake:

The road and the bridge there is Browns Bridge Road. I was able to use this picture and locate the same area in Google maps:

Anyway, while continuing to Athens I kept getting blown slightly off course by the wind, but it wasn't too difficult to get lined back up correctly. Here's a closeup of the VOR equipment in the Cessna Skyhawk:

I don't suppose you can tell much at this resolution, but the top radio (Nav 1) is tuned in to 109.6 MHz, the frequency for the Athens VOR, and the round instrument at the top just to the left of the radio shows your position relative to the selected VOR station. The white vertical line running through the instrument is actually pointing slightly to the right, which means I need to turn slightly to the right to get back on course.

The signal took me straight to Athens, but between the fog, my need to find the airport, and my graphics settings being turned down pretty low, I was not able to spot any recognizable buildings. I was looking for Sanford Stadium in particular. Anyway, just east of Athens I located the airport:

I decided to land on the shorter of the two runways, the one roughly parallel to my current course. I eased in a little closer, banked to the right a bit to get correctly oriented, flew out a bit and turned around to line back up. I had already descended when I got to Athens in order to see the ground better so I didn't have to drop much more altitude to get on the correct glide slope. In fact, I actually started out a little low on this one. Normally I'm too high, which is safer. This approach was particularly dicey because you're flying over houses on the way in. I got on the correct glide slope, but then got too low again just short of the runway and thought I was going to hit a tree. I throttled back up, jumped over the tree, dove back towards the runway, leveled off and flared out nicely at the last minute:

The touchdown was nice and gentle, although the video I took of the final approach, especially when viewed from the tower, was a bit alarming. At some point, I need to figure out how to post videos.

Anyway, here I am in Athens. Sure wish I was really there and could get me a big fat Taco Stand burrito. Mmmmm, mmmmmm.