To make a long story short, I completed my first cross country. We flew to Cleveland Hardwick. It was a nice flight and it only takes about a half hour to get there. I was a little nervous, but I knew that I had planned everything and that it was a good day to fly. I don’t fly much on the weekends. I find that I can usually schedule during the week with no problems. Unfortunately, this week there had been a number of issues that prevented me from flying this cross country during the week. It happened to work out so that I could get it done on Sunday. The airport is different on the weekends. I expected to see more people on the GA ramp, but that wasn’t the case. I saw very few people, but there were noticeably fewer aircraft as well.
Just after arriving, I checked the weather and verified my planning. Everything still checked out, although there was some weather moving into the western part of Tennessee that would be here later in the evening. It was a good day to fly. I went out for preflight, which involved making sure I had the correct sectional, nav log, and my e6b accessible in the cockpit. As usual, everything checked out. Hopefully every preflight will go this way.
After preflighting the plane we got in, strapped in, and started the engine. I radioed for clearance, gave the destination and preferred heading and altitude, and was issued a clearance. Everything was going according to plan. Josh set up the GPS and dimmed it so that I couldn’t peek. We took off and were cleared to our requested altitude (4500 ft) in short order. Unfortunately, we were issued a heading that wasn’t directly on course, which meant that once ATC had cleared us to “resume own navigation” we were off course. We were nearly to the lake before this happened, so I was well to the right of my intended course and nearly past the second checkpoint (it was a short flight). This was exacerbated by my slight inability to detect my reference points.
I managed to get back on course by the time we reached the third checkpoint (Madisonville KMNV). After that it was smooth sailing all the way to Cleveland. With the exception of my initial issues, I spotted all my checkpoints. Though to be fair, I didn’t select the best checkpoints to begin with.
Where the real issue came in was with the E6B and keeping track of everything while flying the plane. While I am confident in my abilities to pilot the plane and perform maneuvers, until today, I did all this without anything that wasn’t mounted in the panel. Now I was combating a giant sectional, that despite my refolding needed further condensing, an E6B, a nav log, seeing the checkpoints and flying the plane. This new workload was quite taxing to say the least.
The next issue came when I made an attempt to calculate my ground speed with the E6B. As we overflew Madisonville, I started the clock and I noted the time at McMinnville (the next checkpoint). I pulled out my E6B, looked at the nav log to determine the distance we had traveled, and dialed in what I thought were the appropriate numbers. This yielded a result that was way off. It looked as though all the practicing I’d done was in vain. From what I understand, the much maligned analog E6B is the preferred device of the FAA examiner that will be administering my check ride. Anyway, Josh ran me through two other ways to determine ground speed. One was to simply call ATC and ask and the other was the GPS. As we were discussing this, Knoxville Departure cut us loose just over McMinnville. This was a first for me and I was surprised how far out we were.
We arrived at Cleveland shortly there after. We entered on a 45 for the downwind to runway 3. Josh mentioned that he didn’t recommend flying in and out of Cleveland if you were hungry because the base leg is basically directly over a strip of restaurants. A quick glance down confirmed this. The other end of the airport is surrounded by ridiculously huge houses. One of which is on a hill straight in line with the runway. It is crazy.
I was pretty high on final and I made a pretty bad landing. We taxied back, I took off, and stayed in the pattern. The second landing wasn’t spectacular but it was better. I don’t know what the deal is. We were going to taxi back, but there was a guy on downwind so we elected to use the taxiway. When we reached the hold short line, he radioed that he was going to fly around town a little bit and reenter on a base leg for 3. We elected to take the runway, which we stated on the radio, and we began taxiing out. This was met with the other guy’s immediate call that he was on final for 3. Josh told me to “turn and take off now”, which I did. It was absolutely ridiculous and we’re pretty certain it was intentional.
The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful and we used the GPS on the way back. We flew over the corn maze. It was a Chikfila maze. Once we were about 20 miles out I called approach and told them we were inbound for landing at McGhee Tyson. After we were closer to the field they set us up for a straight in approach on 5L which is currently 2500′ shorter. This would be my first landing on this runway since they started the Taxiway B project. It made me a bit nervous because I didn’t want to drop it in too short. Unlike my previous two landings, this one was actually good. It was an excellent end to the lesson. The next lesson would be my second cross country and it would be tomorrow. We’ll be headed to London-Corbin (KLOV) and maybe eating at the restaurant there.