We were supposed to fly to French Valley today (Friday, November 19th) as a prep for Long Beach, but got weathered out.
As I said in my last post, “aviate, navigate, communicate” is our motto. The French Valley/Long Beach thing is more of a navigate kind of affair, as in: can I plan a fairly complex cross-country trip to a very busy airport? And French Valley was supposed to be sort of a dress rehearsal to see if I could put a good navigation plan together.
Ah well. Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.
Mac still looked at my plan — and it was good enough — but we didn’t fly there. Mainly we spent about an hour just talking about Long Beach, and then flew out over the ocean for about an hour.
Nothing to dramatic, just basic maneuvers: turns, climbing turns, descents, Dutch rolls, and so on. I had spent so much time over the past few months focusing on landing that a lot of the little details of maneuvering had gotten vague. And so in that sense, it was a good lesson.
Wind, Sand, and Stars 