First Flight With Lauren
Today was my first flight with my wife, Lauren. She is my first real passenger ("technically your DPE is, blah blah"). I didn't know what to expect, I knew she had been up in planes before - she's gone skydiving, something I will probably never do. I'd rather be the person to fly the "JUMPERS AWAY OVER X" than be a jumper. I don't want to make this entire blog about Lauren, although we all know I could. So I will try to keep it 50% airplane talk!
We scheduled a 12pm flight, with an estimate of me probably taking off at 12:30 (took off at 12:40 for pattern and 12:49 to KDAN), Cross country from KTTA to KDAN and back to KTTA. I wanted to fly at 4500'msl there, and 5500'msl back, following the East is Odd +500 and West is Even +500, because it was a 358°ish flight there and a 178°ish back (that's from airport center to airport center, but I did some cloud avoidance, a few times (like, the whole time) so I was pretty off course, but ForeFlight will get me there. I brought my Stratux because I remembered that N8116J didn't like bluetooth and ADSB so my iPad wouldn't connect to the plane. I also bought a new GPYes unit that I wanted to try out, and it worked great, no more magnetic GPS sticking to random magnetic things, everything is self contained in my Stratux!
Wind was good for RWY21, so I had to taxi via Taxiway Alfa to get there, still not a fan of how Wings of Carolina has us do a runup off the taxiway, something I need to get used to at a busier airport than KEEN. Well, we took off and I did a loop of the pattern - I wanted to gauge Lauren's stomach, and my flying abilities to make sure she was okay to fly. The Pressure Density was 2,800'-2,900, which for a 255'msl runway, oooof. After the second takeoff we flew out to the traffic pattern then departed to the north! We climbed up to 3000, the cloud layer was about 3800 so I chose to stay under it, vs fly over the top and chance not having an opening. It was pretty bumpy - there's a convective SIGMET over like the whole east coast - so I knew it was going …
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