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March 20, 2002- Off to Wine Country
Remember when I said it would be six weeks until we made it beyond 20
miles? Well - we got back there again today. We were looking for
crosswinds to practice our landings and couldn't find any close so we headed up
to Napa.
We got up there on VOR navigation via the Concord VOR. Once again I had
another lesson on how hard airports are to spot. Napa was right in a bend
on the Napa River by the North Bay - you could look at the Sectional Chart and
the terrain and know the airport was there - but to actually pick out the
airport didn't happen until it was closer.
One plus is that I've always been good with orientation. I did lots of
land navigation in Scouts and the Army so translating maps and compass vectors
to the real world was easy. Working as a paramedic also was good training
at situational awareness. The same skills that let me keep track in my
head of where every car and truck in the county was also made good tracking of
where all the traffic in the air around me was.
Anyway - into Napa and several rounds of touch and goes and I got two or
three pretty well and a couple more kind of rough. We also got some
practice at wake turbulence avoidance - we landed behind a big Gulfstream III on
one go. But I still couldn't really nail what was making the good landings
good and the bad landings bad.
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