Rob asked me today if I wanted to tag-along with him while he did a few "touch-and-go's" today in his airplane. I was definitely nervous, but I couldn't turn down the opportunity. He rents airplanes these days, since he sold his, so the one we were in today was nice and new with lots of high-tech gadgets. It was a 4-seater, but I couldn't imagine having passengers in that small cockpit. We flew out of RDU towards the Franklin County Airport which was only 30 miles east. The air traffic controller had us pass over downtown Raleigh before we headed out, we were low enough that we got to see everything from a birds-eye view. The view was pretty amazing... we could see tarps all over where the tornado damage was. As you can see from the picture, we passed right next to Carter-Finley and the RBC Center. It only took a few minutes to get to Franklin County. Rob landed and immediately took off again, circled and then went for another landing. For the second landing he wanted to practice landing with minimal runway. I immediately pictured us landing at the far end of the runway and running out of asphalt... Lucky for me, he just meant coming in as soon as possible and using the least amount of runway. If you go to google maps and look at the
franklin county airport, we approached the upper end (where the 23 is) and he had stopped by the time we got to the two thick white lines (before the first turn off)... pretty impressive. It was a pretty cool experience. I thought I would be scared when we took off and landed, based on how big jets speed up and slow down abruptly and loudly. The single engine plane was the exact opposite, it was such a slow experience. It felt like we were up in the air before we had even gotten going, and landing was just like floating down softly. It was definitely bumpy the whole ride, but nothing scary.
Rob asked me today if I wanted to tag-along with him while he did a few "touch-and-go's" today in his airplane. I was definitely nervous, but I couldn't turn down the opportunity. He rents airplanes these days, since he sold his, so the one we were in today was nice and new with lots of high-tech gadgets. It was a 4-seater, but I couldn't imagine having passengers in that small cockpit. We flew out of RDU towards the Franklin County Airport which was only 30 miles east. The air traffic controller had us pass over downtown Raleigh before we headed out, we were low enough that we got to see everything from a birds-eye view. The view was pretty amazing... we could see tarps all over where the tornado damage was. As you can see from the picture, we passed right next to Carter-Finley and the RBC Center. It only took a few minutes to get to Franklin County. Rob landed and immediately took off again, circled and then went for another landing. For the second landing he wanted to practice landing with minimal runway. I immediately pictured us landing at the far end of the runway and running out of asphalt... Lucky for me, he just meant coming in as soon as possible and using the least amount of runway. If you go to google maps and look at the franklin county airport, we approached the upper end (where the 23 is) and he had stopped by the time we got to the two thick white lines (before the first turn off)... pretty impressive. It was a pretty cool experience. I thought I would be scared when we took off and landed, based on how big jets speed up and slow down abruptly and loudly. The single engine plane was the exact opposite, it was such a slow experience. It felt like we were up in the air before we had even gotten going, and landing was just like floating down softly. It was definitely bumpy the whole ride, but nothing scary.
Hmm. I wonder what happened to my comment yesterday.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I thought your adventure sounded cool. Dad didn't get home from work til after midnight so he hasn't seen it yet. it reminded me of the first time we flew to Fayetteville in a little plane like this that one of the guys Dad worked with owned. He flew us to Fayetteville, Nana and Papa picked us up at the airport and then he went on to FL. and flew back to Cheraw and picked us up at that little airstrip near Nana and Papa's to fly us back to Delaware. I liked flying in the small plane.