Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Catching Up on Good Times

I've just realized that I never did post about our long IFR cross country-- and I never posted about the B17 (that will be the next post, I think). We had to cancel our IFR trip once because of weather, but then did finally make the trip in early October. We had great weather for it-- plenty of nice sunshiny, blue skies-- AND to make things more interesting, a portion of actual IMC conditions in both directions.

We decided to fly to Montauk, NY-- to a little airport just north of the Hamptons. We figured it would be an interesting flight up, cool to see all the beach mansions, and a good place to get some seafood for lunch. And it pretty much delivered on all accounts-- though a combination of aviation time and strong winds took its toll on our schedule. I'm not sure if our instructor's wife has forgiven us (or him!) yet for how late he was getting home that evening.

On the way up, we had a spectacular view of New York-- and JFK. Wow. What fun to see all the different aircraft flying in and out of there! I'm not sure of all of the locations of these pictures- but I know most are of NYC and JFK... Those from the area may be able to help my deficient memory...




Then we headed up Long Island to the Hamptons. It was beautiful! Check out the houses (and pools!) in the picture on the right.

After we landed, the woman at the FBO gave us a ride to the other end of the runway so we could walk along the beach. (Then the van wouldn't start, so she ended up having to leave it there and walk back to the FBO!)
We walked about 2 miles to a restaurant where we had lunch looking out at the water. The pic on the left is of Husband and Instructor- deep in conversation. They didn't seem to want to put their feet in the water (it was COLD). The one on the right is of Husband-- with the ocean in the background, of course!
I flew on the way home-- Husband took this shot of the harbor as we left. The pic on the right is of me landing at ISLIP. Look at that perfect glide slope-- red over white, I'm alright!

Slightly different view of JFK this time-- the overcast started just on the south side of the field. I took the foggles off and had about 45 minutes of actual instrument conditions. Then- it suddenly cleared and we had a beautiful sunset.

2 comments:

Matt said...

Nice! Is it sad that I can tell you landed on 24 at Islip just by the way the taxiways converge?

Looks like you guys had a lot of fun. Isn't it so cool to fly over JFK!?

Head in the Clouds said...

Yeah- it was awesome flying over JFK. We were surprised they gave us that route-- it doesn't ever happen at Dulles, of course. Though I have flown over BWI and Philly before. We got some really crazy vectors going into Islip-- circling around a bunch. Interesting experience...