Hunstville to Meridian

Another day mostly snowed in here in Dalton. Actually the roads are pretty clear, but in Georgia if there's one flake of snow on the ground, you have to sit at home and do nothing. I think it's a state law or something.

Anyway, decided to do some flying this afternoon. I started back at Madison Executive, where I had made my snowy landing yesterday. When the simulator loaded up, I had beautiful blue skies and now sign of snow. I don't think FSX draws snow on the ground unless it's currently snowing, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, I listened in on the weather broadcast at the airport, selected a runway for takeoff, and started my taxi. Oddly though, by the time I got out to the runway the weather had taken a dramatic turn for the worst. Instead of blue skies, it had started snowing, and the wind direction had changed almost 180 degrees. I was forced to change my takeoff runway designation and taxi down to take off from the other direction based on the new wind direction.

You can see there's now snow on the ground and falling from the sky, although the sky itself still shows a lot of blue oddly enough.

Takeoff was uneventful. Due to the wind, I took off heading north and then had to bank around to the southwest to pick up the VOR station I would be using to start my navigation.

Once I had flown over the station and picked up my radian heading south and a bit west, I started trying to tune in the VOR in Birmingham for the next leg of the flight. It's only about 70 nautical miles to the south, so I picked it up pretty quickly.

Here's another FSX oddity. As I left the snowstorm behind, I looked back at Huntsville and notice that the snowfall seemed to be confined to a rectangular area around the city. In this image, you can see the southwest corner of the snowy rectangle covering Huntsville.

I continued south and then southwest, picking up VOR stations along the way. I used a total of four to reach Meridian, although there was a fifth on my flight plan that I never could get tuned in for some reason. I even double checked and made sure I had written the frequency down correctly.

By the time I got to Meridian, just across the border in Mississippi, the skies were clear blue and the weather was great. I flew most of the trip at about 10,000 feet to try to stay above the clouds, but about 40 miles out I dropped down to 4500 feet and then down to about 2,000 feet as I approached the airport.

Here I am entering the landing pattern at Key Field (Meridian Airport). That's I-59 between me and the airport and snaking off to the south. The active runway is the one heading opposite my direction so I had to fly downwind, turn around, and come back north to land.

My landing pattern was flawless and my landing was pretty good. No stall alarms or other major problems, just a nice steady descent to the runway.

I did catch a bit of crosswind right before touchdown which made the wings wobble a bit, but I got her straightened out and touchdown just fine.

This was about a 200 nautical mile trip, so almost two hours of flight time. The Skylane handled like a dream, so I'm glad I switched back to it for the time being. I'll obviously need to work my way up to more difficulty and demanding aircraft in the future, but I don't think I'm there yet.