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| Enroute to Scone |
With a new aircraft type authorised in my log book and some training on the procedures at Bankstown, the time had finally come to put all this new knowledge to some use. A friend of mine, Dave, was driving from Sydney to Scone to see some relatives and I took the opportunity to fly up to meet him on Saturday, stay overnight before returning on Sunday. Billy was pleased to come along for the ride.
This was a virgin navigation flight for me in many ways. Id not headed north from Sydney in a light aircraft apart from as a passenger on one occasion. There are a few things to consider in particular The Lane. The lane is a strip of airspace between Williamstown military airspace and Sydney control zone. I had flown this a few times previously so all was good and my flight planning took this into consideration.
Saturday morning came and after getting a rather good weather forecast we headed off to Bankstown. I did delay the departure time until mid-day as there was supposed to be cloud and mist at Scone. Departure was delayed a little further whilst I got instruction on how to operate a new combined radio and GPS unit in SFK. Id not used such a unit before but after the instruction, found it intuitive to use and the GPS with a massive colour screen a good support fornavigation. At 12:30 we finally took off on runway 11C with the route being Bankstown, Prospect Reservoir, Parramatta, Brooklyn Bridge, Maitland and Scone. It was not the shortest route but did avoid the rougher terrain and associated rougher turbulence and the road network below helped with the navigation.
I happily got into the habit of changing fuel tanks on a regular basis a new requirement when flying a Warrior. The warning from my instructor that there are two types of pilot, those who have forgot to switch tanks and those that are going to probably helped to remind me. I choose to switch tanks every 15 minutes (on the hour, quarter and half past the hour) marking each switch on my flight plan and this worked well keeping the tanks even throughout the flight.
Whilst there were only a few clouds around and the mist had gone there was plenty of turbulence but good visibility. The airfield at Scone was easy to spot after I realised it wasnt the racetrack which is adjacent to it. With little wind around and no other traffic I had the best kind of landing an uneventful one. I then had to backtrack along the runway to the parking area on the east side of the field where I found a nice spot to park complete with tie downs. I was concerned I may be using someones parking spot but the phone call the day before did inform me to park on the easy side of the field.
Dave was waiting at the airfield and he picked us up to take us to the Motel. We then had some good food and a tour of the area before heading off met up with Daves relatives. We finally hit the sack at the Colonial Motor Inn which at $95 was a reasonable place to stay.
The motel had a socket I could plug my laptop in to get the weather. This was convenient and helped me complete my return flight plan conveniently. We then got breakfast in Scone and had a wander round before calling the Scone Taxi Service. Apparently there are just two cars with only one on duty at a time. It was around 11am and we were the drivers first call of the day. The trip from the centre of scone to the Airport took around 10 minutes at $12.
Thankfully the Warrior was still where we left it! I took the same route back which again was pretty uneventful apart from continued turbulence. An earlier start may have helped on that front. One thing of note was a general broadcast on the area frequency advising Williamstown control zone was going to become active for just 15 minutes whilst an aircraft flew in. My plan did not take me through here but it was worth knowing it can become active at such shortnotice and for such a short duration of time. The cloud was certainly getting lower and denser the further south we came but still fine for the necessary ground clearance.
Arrival at Bankstown was greeted with a change of runway. All my training and subsequent arrivals and departures had been on a 11 runway. This time the ATIS broadcast advised arrivals and departures were on runway 29. I remembered the procedure of continuing to the airfield at 1500 ft before descending to a circuit height of 1,000 ft once past the tower. This worked out fine and a reasonable landing followed. The taxi route to the flying club required that I held for clearance to cross an active but this was soon given and we were parked up in no time.
All in all I enjoyed the weekend very much. Im now looking forward to more cross country flights around NSW and hopefully beyond.
Today's aircraft - FTU