Traffic reporting

Yesterday the weather was beautiful. For various reasons, I decided to knock off work early, head out to the airport, and take advantage of it.

Something that I had wanted to do the last time I was flying was to visit another airport, but the weather was marginal and I decided against it. Yesterday was a different story. I headed north toward the Arlington airport, tuned in the CTAF frequency, and listened to traffic. It was somewhat busy, which wasn't surprising given the weather, and the fact that it's a much larger airport than Harvey Field.

I circled around the airport with a radius of a few miles to familiarize myself with the area a bit, notifying the other traffic of my position as I did so. The last time I'd been there was years ago during my flight training. I then decided to perform a touch and go so, as I was circling around south of the airport I announced I would be heading around to the west to enter the 45 for a right pattern to land on 16. As I was approaching the point where I planned to enter the 45, I heard another pilot announce that he was over Lake Goodwin and was entering the 45. I didn't know where that was (though I do now) but I assumed it was one of a couple lakes visible to the west of the airport. The thing is, it was also west of my position and I worried if I followed my originally planned course, I would be cutting right in front of him.

So I looked over at my iPad which was showing traffic information from my Stratux ADS-B receiver. I located the aircraft in question and, sure enough, he was pretty much where I thought he was. If I had followed my plan, I would have been cutting in front of him, and quite likely we would have gotten, shall we say, uncomfortably close. So I kept heading west for a bit longer, then turned around and came in behind him. It worked out rather well, I was able to spot him and maintain a good, safe separation between us.

If I hadn't had the ADS-B traffic information available, I probably would have done the same thing, just to be on the safe side, but it provided me with a level of situational awareness that I really appreciated. I think it's already more than paid for itself and would highly recommend that all pilots pick up an ADS-B receiver and tablet if at all possible.

Comments

My engine is so pretty

I went out to the shop today to take a few pictures of my engine and plane before the engine is remounted. The baffling and some other stuff has already been attached to the engine. The engine mount is not back yet. Since the nose gear is attached to the engine mount, the plane is currently sitting on the main gear, and a couple of supports just behind the firewall, and under the tail. Here are a few of the photos I took. The engine looks lovely, to me at any rate, especially since I know those are new cylinders.

Flying when you must

The previous post was titled "Flying when you can." Today the weather was so nice that there was no question about whether or not I'd go up. Today is Saturday, and if you have weather this nice on the weekend, at this time of year, you can't not go flying if it's at all possible. I'll probably go tomorrow, too. I hope so. With the work that was done during and after the annual inspection, my plane is finally fully functional. As far as I know, everything on it works. The intercom is even behaving itself, with a distinct lack of loud static during the last couple of flights. The shop didn't say if they did anything specific to fix it but either they did when I last asked them to take a look at it, or it's somehow sorted itself out. Hopefully it will work just fine, at least until I decide to replace the audio panel with one that has the intercom built in. As noted above, the weather today was absolutely gorgeous. I flew north out of Harvey Field up past...

Night flying

One of the things I've wanted to do since I got current is to go up at night with an instructor for a refresher flight. While I can't do that in my airplane, I can still do it on one of the flight school's planes so I made a reservation for this evening to spend some time with an instructor in a 172. While the weather looked a bit iffy, it was good enough to go flying. I met my instructor at the appointed time, 7:00pm local time. The first thing we did was go out and perform the preflight inspection on the plane while there was sufficient daylight. After that, we spent about half an hour or so in his office going over the things to be aware of when flying at night. Once that was done, we walked out to the plane, got in, started it up, and headed out. We headed north for a while as we discussed the unique aspects of piloting and navigating at night. For example, using the horizon as an attitude reference, and recognizing the presence of poor weather conditions. The weather i...

A Man and His Airplane

Search This Blog