Thursday, October 04, 2007

Pilot's logbook

Planned: cross country to Bloomington.

Compass wasn't working in 011. The part has been ordered for a couple of weeks. We got the ok to take the Piper Warrior instead. I took the checklist out to preflight, and spent at least 20 min. looking for the lever for flaps. I found it in the POH book, right beside the pilot's seat.

Couldn't figure out why planned course was so far off from the VOR, and I kept trying to check it out. (After we got back, Todd looked at it and found the headings that were wrong--I used a westerly course to come back to the outbound radial after skirting the towers, and then mistakenly continued to use that course for the next couple of checkpoints instead of the right course one along the radial.)

At any rate, it got hard to know where we were. At the height of this foolishness, we came up on an unexpected layer of rain and rain-clouds. I kept talking about how we should just go back, but was waiting for Todd to call the shots on it, and he was wanting me to do it, which was correct. Eventually, we turned around and came back.

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