Today was a beautiful day in Indiana, and due to a cancellation yesterday, the plane was available from 3:00 on, and with sundown now after 8:15, that’s plenty of time for a cross-country flight. Illinois was looking pretty gusty due to the front that is moving in (which will make Indiana pretty windy tomorrow), so I needed a new flight route. I figured one good stop was Muncie, which is the home of the FAA designated examiner that will do my checkride. So it makes sense to 1) know how to find the airport and 2) have landed there before checkride day. With the winds not too bad, that was borderline on the 2.1 hours of cross-country flight I had left. So I needed another stop, which was 50 miles from both Bloomington and Muncie. Willis suggested Crawfordsville, since it has a runway that was reasonably aligned with today’s wind, not too busy, and wouldn’t charge a landing fee. Crawfordsville sounded reasonable to me, so the course was KBMG -> KCFJ -> KMIE -> GEZ -> KBMG. GEZ is a VOR west of Indianapolis — useful in this case for getting from Muncie back to B’ton without getting close to Indianapolis International’s class C airspace.
591 made two trips to Muncie today – the first was by one of the other students going up to do his checkride. Due to a scheduling snafu up there, he was a bit late getting back, but no big deal at all – I still got out well before 3:00. All three legs of the trip were completely uneventful. A bit bouncy, but nothing to cause any problems. I made 1 bad approach and 2 not-so-smooth landings (the bad approach led to a good landing, of course). I think my slightly rough landing at B’ton was because for once in my life I flew a perfect 3 degree approach angle and carried a bit too much power into flare because while I reduced it, I wasn’t used to having that much power on in the first place. Usually I seem to make a slightly steep approach, so I’m way low on power crossing the threshold, so there isn’t much more to remove during the landing flare. Such is life – I’ll take the smooth approach and work on the landings as time goes on :).
And now, the geeky maps from the GPS:
