Today, we had  a plan A of my 3rd solo which would sign me off to fly by myself.  However, since winds were higher than forecasted, we went with plan B, which was my first cross country solo to Richmond county airport (KRCZ).

The night before, I made a plan and filled out some way points and initial headings.  2 hours before the flight, I got the winds aloft and determined my wind correction and predicted ground speeds.  Having this, I also filled out the time for each leg of my trip and how much fuel that I would burn.

While I pre-flighted, my instructor went over my flight plan numbers.  Once completed, we went over the process for filing a flight plan.  I called up the briefer and filed for TTA-SDZ-RCZ-SDZ-TTA.

We head out to the airplane and go through the startup, runup, set radios.  Normally, I set the radios to CTAF and AWOS for TTA since I stay in the area.  Since we were going cross country, I changed the next frequency to flight services in order to open up my flight plan.

As we climbed to our altitude of 4500, I called flight service and opened up our flight plan.  After a few minutes of trying to get service to realize that it was 89433 not 69433, we were all squared.  Next I called up Fayetteville approach to request a flight following.  This went much better than last time as I have memorized the script.

The rest of the trip to RCZ was pretty boring.  I followed a power-line all the way to the SDZ VOR.  Kept speed and heading, while writing down times at each of my visual checkpoints. My landing at RCZ was pretty poor, and we floated a bit.  Sigh.

As we headed back to TTA, we were at an altitude with quite a bit more turbulence, 3500 ft msl.  Not a big deal but annoying trying to hold altitude.  The flight home was pretty uneventful but my landing at TTA was even worse than RCZ.  I did a half ass slip that did nothing for maintaining center line or glide-slope.  Sigh.  My instructor remarked to me, “After next solo I will sign you off and you can do landings to your hearts content.”

Next Flight, Plan A –  3rd Solo, Plan B – Hood work.  Hopefully the weather gets better than forecasted. Right now it sucks.

I promise I am going to add some more media to my posts.  I’m at a crazy point in training so it is hard to snap pictures in flight.  My instructor might throw my phone out of the window. 😀