It seems these cross country trips are getting easier. I guess that’s a good thing.
Hunter and I planned a flight to Wallace so we could see the coast and ocean from the air, but the clouds were forecast to be too low for our comfort, we changed our plans and headed west to Lexington and Salisbury for a simple cross country.
Both airports are very similar to Sanford, so nothing really new here. I’d flown into Lexington once before on my first solo night cross country, but I hadn’t seen it during the day. For the first time, I flew out of Sanford on the first leg of our trip. We would be returning well before dark as this was an early morning flight (well, 10am… early for me). Since we had a headwind from the west, I flew the first leg and Hunter took us the short trip to Salisbury and back to Sanford.
We had no problems finding our way there and back and everything went as planned. The only thing worth noting is that we flew 433, which I’m not particularly fond of, but it had noticeably better performance than 333, which Hunter and I have taken on all our previous flights together. After departure from Lexington, we were climbing well over 1,000 feet per minute. 333 was never that good to us. Some of it was probably the weather… the cool air and cloudy sky was giving us a performance boost and some up-drafts, but I think that plane just does a better job at climbing than the others. I wish we’d taken it to the grass strip at Buffalo Creek.