Houma-Terrebonne

Today's flight was another for mostly sight-seeing. I took off from Louis Armstrong and flew back over New Orleans. You can see most of the city, including down-town and Lake Pontchartrain in the background:

About this time I had to pause the flight for a while. When I picked back up my father-in-law, who used to have a pilot's license, was visiting so he watched me fly for a while. We followed the Mississippi River south towards the gulf. Shortly before its end, we turned to the right and headed along the coastline, first over Grande Isle, Louisiana:
Part of my reason for flying down to the gulf was to see if FSX modeled the many off-shore oil rigs in this area. Either it doesn't, or they don't show up with my display settings. Yet another FSX scenery disappointment.

There's also not much else to see down here, mostly rivers and swamps, classic bayou country:
After a while I turned northwest, planning to head up to Baton Rouge. My father-in-law needed to leave though, so I decided to land early so he could see that part of the flight. I started looking around and spotted a mid-sized airport ahead and off to the right a bit. Using the air traffic control function, I identified it as Houma-Terrebonne. Houma is the town just to the north and is the largest town in the Terrebonne Parrish.

When I requested clearance too land, I was several miles to the south of the airport and cruising at 5,000 feet. I had to line-up and loose a bunch of altitude pretty quick. I ended up trying a maneuver I had recently learned from a book, Microsoft Flight Simulator X for Real World Pilots. It's a good book for learning how to fly, whether just in FSX, or in real life, using FSX for additional practice and training.

The maneuver is called a slip, and is performed by banking the wings in one direction and then using the rudder in the other direction to compensate and keep from turning. As you bank, the wings lift is partly diverted in the direction of the bank to make you turn. The rudder then cancels the turn so the net effect is to keep flying straight, but with less lift from the wings. You thereby increase your rate of descent but without gaining airspeed the way you would if you just pointed the nose at the ground and kept your wings level.

Anyway, the trick worked like a charm. I got my altitude bled off while simultaneously reducing air speed and made a text-book landing:
Good landings are always fun, but are especially sweet when your father-in-law, who used to be a pilot, happens to be watching.

Anyway, not sure if I'm going to fly from here up to Baton Rouge or not. Maybe I'll just leave from here and head straight to Texas, maybe Galveston to keep me near the coast. There's a bunch of oil rigs along that route (in the real world), so maybe I'll give FSX another chance to show me one. I may even crank up the display settings to improve my odds.