Vectors To Final

Posted by my wife: Today Jason and I flew from KPHF to KFFA for lunch. Our plan was to walk to a nearby Dairy Queen or Subway that Jason had read about, grab food to go, return to the park, have a leisurely lunch in the grass, and tour the monument and museum before the return flight. Jason asked me (the non-pilot wife!) to write this up to give a different perspective. My role today was part nagivator, part entertainer :) You must give me both creative license and a large quantity of forgiveness for everything that is stated improperly or called by the wrong name! We got to PHF a little later than planned, around 11:15. We got checked in and went out to the tarmac. Jason walked through the preflight a little more slowly than usual, talking me through what he was doing and having me spot check some things. Bear with me and I'll recite some of what I learned, in no particular order... (jump down to the ----------- a few paragraphs down to skip this section...) The flat little d

I saw this post on PitchPull (a great blog) today. It has a link to a funny, fairly short story about someone's first helicopter lesson.

Today Krista and I went up for an instrument flight of 1.6 hours. We went over to Petersburg to shoot an approach, which was in "actual" until we were a few miles out. We then went over to RIC to go for an ILS approach. Unfortunately, it was down for maintenance, so we shot a GPS approach in its place. We canceled IFR shortly thereafter since there were no clouds at JGG and we had time constraints. But the real point of this flight was to try out the new toy: a Garmin GPSmap 296 . We bought this about 2 weeks ago, to act as a automotive-based GPS and an aviation one. I can't say it has been without problems. The battery that came with it would not take a charge so a call to Garmin got them to send a new battery to me (BTW, call the non-800 technical support number if you want prompt phone service). However, during the call to get the battery fixed up, they had me do a special reset, where you hold down the "out", "quit" and "nrst" butt