I’m in the process of catching up on posts and this one is from early November when we had gone to Arizona for a family wedding. It was a 4-5 day affair where we had a huge gathering to celebrate my nephew’s wedding. Since we hadn’t taken real time off in a while, we thought this would be an ideal time to take a vacation either before or after the wedding. My brother was flying in from California and we coordinated plans to stay a few more days after the wedding to do some local sight seeing – and may be drive up to Sedona.
With that in mind, I searched for and found a school that rented aircraft to non students. The school, like any other, had a checkout requirement which I scheduled for in the early days of my trip down there. That way, once I got my checkout, I could rent out the aircraft a couple of times in the 10 day period that we were planning to be there to do local sight seeing. I was even entertaining the idea of going up to Sedona one of the days knowing fully well that it had to be a day that wasn’t too hot as I did not want to deal with density altitude issues especially knowing that Sedona airport is at an elevation. However, given that this was early November, that problem was unlikely.
The day of checkout was in between two events during the day. Right after the first event, I took an Uber went to the flight school and had two hours of ground followed by a flight. The aircraft available at the flight school had 6 pack with vaccum guages while the ones in my local flight school have G3X and no vaccum guages. While not an issue, I like and have gotten used to the electronic display. The only challenge is the familiarity with the airspace. We covered that in our ground school but it obviously takes a bit of practise and reading up to make sure you are not encroaching into unauthorized airspace and understand the local visual landmarks that ATC, local pilots and students use. The other nuanced part of this area is that there are Class D airspaces just next to each other with a common boundary and there is a airforce base that sometimes may be active and not at other times. In addition the class D airspaces are under the Class B shelf so you have to keep track of that as well.
The checkout flight itself was uneventful and the CFI thought I did a good job and gave me a check out. I too enjoyed flying out in the phoenix area. The terrain and the view is very different from what I am used to in the pacific north west. The plan was for me to go back a couple of times to do some local sight seeing and like I mentioned before even go back to Sedona. However, my brother decided to cut back his vacation and head back early. My wife had a lot of office work pending on her plate so we also decided to head back early cutting our 8 day long vacation down to 4 days. I do intend to go back down there and get current with the school to rent an aircraft and fly out to Sedona. Hopefully sometime soon!
Here is the track of my flight. The practice area is a vast open flat land just south of the mountains!
astropilotdad.com 