Eblo

Class D Solo

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On 3/8/04 I soloed up to Kenosha (ENW), which is in Class D airspace. This basically means that it's busy enough to have a control tower. In order to fly into the airspace and land at the airport, you need to contact the control tower and be cleared to land, taxi, and take off again. It was my first solo to another airport and I had to talk to controllers on top of it!

As you can tell by the GPS plot above, I flew north from Campbell (C81) and kept flying north! I was having second thoughts about flying into the Class D space. I'd been signed off by my instructor to solo there, but it had been a while since I was there with him. I was worried I was going to do something wrong or forget to do something entirely. Finally I decided to stop being a wimp, dialed in the ATIS frequency on the second radio, got the information I needed, and then tuned in the tower on the primary radio. After all, Brice would have signed me off if I wasn't ready, and if I did start to screw up, simply saying "Student Pilot" to the controllers would have gotten me all the help I needed.

I made my initial call to the tower to get their attention, and then let them know who and where I was and what I wanted to do. The nice gentleman at the other end of the radio was nice enough to tell me to come on in and report 3 miles out from the airport. Yes, it really was that easy. What had I been worried about?

I was assigned to runway 24R. This meant I'd have to make a right-hand traffic pattern, which is opposite from a standard pattern. This is done to keep traffic from flying over certain areas or obstacles, in this case, the parallel runway, 24L. Luckily 24R is the same runway I'd practiced on with Brice, so I was comfortable with the pattern and my entry into it based on where I was coming from. While approaching the airport, I did forget to turn on my landing light. It's a good idea to turn it on to help the controllers spot you (control towers don't necessarily have radar capabilities), but it isn't required, so this wasn't a big deal. I'll just have to remember it in the future.

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I called the tower again when I was about three miles out, and they cleared me to land. As you can see above, I didn't execute perfect patterns - the ends should be more squared off - but they got the job done. There wasn't a whole lot of other traffic in the area, so everything was pretty stress free. I did three full-stop landings with a slight crosswind from the left. On the last landing, I realized that despite the crosswind, I hadn't even thought about the controls at all, I just flew the plane down to the runway and adjusted where needed. The realization that the process is becoming second-nature was very encouraging.

After announcing my intention to depart the airport and getting cleared to take off again, I blasted off from Kenosha for the last time and headed back to the southwest towards Campbell. I realized I still had a little time left in my hour, so I decided to fly out around the Chain O' Lakes and do a little sight-seeing. I wanted to take some time to just enjoy flying and not necessarily be 'working' on something. I circled once over the big Thelen gravel pit west of Antioch to get a better view of their operation. I also got to do a little train spotting as I flew over the Route 12 bridge and headed home. The approach and landing back at C81 were pretty routine. I can't believe it, landings are getting routine.

So I've got another hour of solo time in the books. No offense, Brice, but I really love flying alone!

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[Ed. Doh! Had the runway numberr wrong for KENW, it was 24R, not 23R.]

Posted by oblivion at March 8, 2004 10:35 PM