Runway 18

Today was an excellent day to fly.  I was told to plan my flight from Freeway to Cape May, but was told that I wouldn’t make it there, and instead would divert to another airport.  Which one, I had no clue.  So, I planned my flight to and from Cape May.  We left Freeway, climbed to 5500′ once outside of the SFRA and proceeded to the Waterloo VOR (ATR).  About half way there, I was told that we were diverting to Georgetown (KGED), which was located southeast of where we were.

As it was my first diversion, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go.  I was told to go ahead and divert to Georgetown so the first thing I did was to get a rough idea of where to turn (Southeast in this case) and make the turn.  The worst thing to do is to keep flying in your original direction (afterall, there is probably a reason you are diverting, be it weather, medical emergency, aircraft emergency, someone reallllly has to go to the bathroom, whatever the case).  Once I made the turn to the SE, I entered the frequencies from the sectional into the radio (AWOS, Unicom).  Once I had that entered, I pulled out the A/FD to look up the runway information (which isn’t on the sectional).  You can get a rough idea of the runway numbers, but you can’t get the lengths, traffic pattern altitude, elevation, etc.  Once I had that, I listened to the weather in the area, then tuned into the Georgetown traffic.

It was an ok lesson overall.  Next weekend, I will head out to Easton with my instructor to get some crosswind landings in, followed by my X-Country progress check with another instructor.  Once I have that out of the way, I’ll do some SOLO X-Country flights.  After the solo’s, I’ll get some night flight, with night solo X-Country and then simply review before my final FAA checkride.  My instructor thinks I can be done with all of this by next month!  That’d be nice, but I’d be happy just to be done by the end of the year.

~ Brian

Hours logged: 2.0

Total hours:  46.0