Yesterday I went up the school to do a local flight but when I got there a few people were going on a navigation flight to Shoreham so we tagged along and I did hour building: Shoreham to Cranfield.
This was cool because I got to do a lot of things for the first time. I
got to do a zone transit of the Luton ATZ and fly near the runway where I got to see the big boys (easyJet and Ryanair up close and personal). I got to fly in between all the restricted airspace for all the London airports and I got to fly to Shoreham which is a really cool airport down in Brighton.
The PA28 is a cool plane especially as it holds four people. I have and only flew a C152 up to this point and I love this plane but the fact it only holds two people is pretty limiting especially when planning landaways. I need to get some more time on the PA28 as it will allow me to go on trips with some people at my school as well as take more people flying at the same time.
We departed Cranfield and headed towards Luton, from here we got a zone transit across Luton at no more than 2000ft. We went down between the airspace at Gatwick and Stansted before flying down to the coast at Brighton before requesting the join to land at Shoreham.
We were on a tight turn around so we grabbed a quick bite to eat before I flew the return leg along the same route (but reversed obviously). Flying the PA28 turned out to be not all that different from the C152. The main things I needed to remember were the new rotation speeds, climb speeds and the speeds for the different parts of the approach.
Oh, there is a manual fuel tank switch that you have to remember to change, which I find quite weird.
The PA28 we were flying G-HARN also had much fancier equipment that I had to learn.
The flight each way was 1 hour and we flew the majority of the flight around 2000ft.
I am not flying next week, then I am off to Scotland the following weekend (with easyJet not flying myself) and I am at Bristol Ground School the one after for my accelerator weekend so hopefully I can go flying in four weeks’ time.
