Merry Christmas Charlie Brown

Heading back to Georgia this afternoon. Took off from Gainesville with the real weather still nice. Nothing but blue skies:

I climbed out heading north and got up to 12,000 feet, at which point I could see the Atlantic Ocean off to my right and the Gulf of Mexico off to the left. Pretty neat, but screenshots don't do it justice since you're just looking at a blue line on the horizon.

The engine didn't sound right at that altitude so I became concerned that there were adjustments I should make for the thin air (even though I had the fuel mixture on auto-adjust). I decided to drop back down to about 8,000 feet. Once I got the airplane trimmed out again and everything seemed to be running smoothly, I climbed into the back seat to take a break:

Again, this was done by moving my virtual head position back, and down a bit, until it seemed to be in about the right place for a back-seat passenger. Kind of weird with no pilot up there though.

I also experimented with opening the doors in flight which worked fine (in spite of the 100+ mph wind blowing against them). The open doors also seemed to have zero effect on flight performance.

Enough screwing around, we're getting close to Atlanta now. I still have air traffic turned down to minimum, but even then Atlanta is kind of busy. The ATC at Hartsfield called me to verify that I had seen another plane to my 4:00 a few hundred feet up and 4 miles off. I had not seen it at all, but found it once they pointed it out. It was a large Airbus passenger plane apparently heading into Macon. It's amazing how you can pass something that big and that close and not even notice it. Of course, with a high wing, visibility for what's above you isn't so great.

I started my descent and was looking around when I spotted this strange building south of Atlanta:

Looks like a grand stand with an airport behind it. As best I can tell (from a post flight check in Google Earth) this is probably supposed to be Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Further north I spotted Hartsfield and flew around it to the south and west. I've been using their VOR frequency to find Atlanta, but I'll be landing at Fulton County (Charlie Brown) Airport to the west of town.

Here's Hartsfield with some of the Atlanta skyline in the background:

There was a 737 taking off as I flew past but I didn't manage to get a good picture of that.

Charlie Brown, named after an Atlanta politician some time ago and not the Peanuts character, is about 10 miles NNW of Hartsfield. Finding it was not difficult and the tower instructed me to enter the pattern to the right and downwind to line up on runway 14.

I managed the pattern entry without a problem, but then became rather confused when I spotted a big blue half-a-blimp sticking out of the ground on the north side of the airfield:

Not sure what to make of that. I was so bothered by it though that I completely forgot that the airport was not at zero elevation like the coastal airports I've been used to. You generally fly the pattern at about 1,000 feet, but the altimeter is set at sea level, not ground level, and Charlie Brown is at 844 feet. As I got down to below 1,500 feet I realized something was wrong, but I was probably only a couple hundred feet off the ground before I figured out what I had done, gunned the engine, and began my 180 turn back toward the runway.

I then managed to climb too high and make a poor turn which put me at a rather awkward altitude and angle to land.

You can see the white lights mean I'm too high and I'm obviously not lined up. I could have aborted and flown around again, but I decided to go for it.

I angled hard left and pointed the nose back towards the ground. As I got closer, I angled hard right to get lined back up. I'm still too high, but my line is looking better:

More flaps, less power, keep the nose pointed down and level the wings. Pretty soon I was over the runway, still pretty high but it's a long runway and I had manage to get lined up correctly.

I just kept the nose down until the runway looked close enough to land on and then started nosing up. I probably touched down about the middle of the runway, but like I said, it's a long runway and my Skylane doesn't need that much room to stop.

You can see in this last image that I'm lined up perfectly. In spite of my altitude screw-up, I manged to pull of a nice landing to end the day.

I'm going to take a break now and then fly back to Dalton tomorrow (Christmas Eve) so I'll be home for Christmas.