Goodnight

I just survived a cross country night flight. I never explained what "cross country" means, did I? Cross country does not imply you are flying across a political country, like the United States of America. It's more like flying across the...countryside. A cross country flight is any flight that departs one airport and lands at another. For student pilots, cross country also means going to an airport at least 50 nautical miles away, because otherwise it doesn't count towards your merit-badge-like requirements for getting your license.

So tonight we flew from Boeing field to some airport called Skaggit which was 50 miles away, and I actually planned the route myself. The workload in the cockpit was, once again, super busy and annoying. My instructor kept asking what we were supposed to do, and I'd take, I don't know, a whole second to answer, and then right as I was about to start doing it, or still looking up the radio frequency to use, he would point out something else I needed to do. Maintain altitude--do we climb yet? and where are we? and shouldn't we be calling Paine field because we're going right up against their airspace and we should have called seattle departure for flight following and mark off the time to the checkpoint do we climb here? That, right there, happened in about 5 minutes. Maybe 10.

Never got around to calling Seattle approach, or Paine field. Also there is this buzz phrase called "using all available resources." This means that when I finally understand how to use one of the navigation instruments, and start using it all the time, I am told to pretend its broken and use a different one, like the ridiculously complicated GPS unit. If you have a GPS in your car, there is a good chance you have no idea how hard it is to use an airplane GPS. Perhaps the best description is for me to say this: I've been using the GPS unit for a while now, and I'm still now sure how to get the screen that shows a little airplane on a map, marking your location. I think you turn one of the big knobs. Could

And then on the way back we had to pretend to get lost, and then we had to pretend to divert to an alternate airport. This was fun, because we were actually five thousand feet directly above our alternate airport while doing all this pretending. Unfortunately for me, my instructor told me I wasn't allowed to use the conveniently placed airport, though.

I have to actually do one of these ridiculous flights by myself. I think I am going to plan on going as slow as I safely can, just so I have time to think. I already tried to make it easy on myself; when you make a flight plan, you have to draw your course and mark all of these checkpoints, and mark where you start and stop climbing to different altitudes. I purposely chose the airport and path and checkpoints so that they would be as few and far as possible, and I would have the least amount of work to do.

Speaking of work, I need to go to bed.