That was fun!

This morning, I flew out of Villeneuve, with my dad, to Barrhead. It's a 33 nautical mile trip over beautiful prairie and lakes. It was a very fun flight!

South of Barrhead

I've been nervous to fly the planes at my new flying club at Villeneuve. They are 172s, which is what I trained on, but they are slightly different than what I'm used to. They have analog instruments (affectionately known as 'steam gauges') and carbureted engines (which means you have to know when to heat the carburetor so it doesn't ice up), along with other slight differences such as how the flap levers and radios work. As well, Villeneuve is a towered airport, whereas I trained at a small, uncontrolled airport. I joined this club precisely for these different experiences but, right now, while I'm a new pilot, the lack of familiarity with the planes at Villeneuve has caused me some stress when I think about flying there.

I was terribly nervous when I did my first flight there as pilot-in-command in August, although it turned out to be perfectly fine. Today, the weather looked good and the wind seemed manageable, so we were looking forward to going up. I wasn't nervous at all today! I have never been so relaxed before a flight and it was a nice feeling. I had reserved the flying club plane with which I'm most familiar so that helped. As soon as I sat in it, and scanned the equipment, I felt good to go.

My favourite flying club plane - C-GJJL

The airport was quiet and the sun was shining. I taxied down to the active runway, did the run-up, and then got take-off clearance. We turned out of the circuit and set the GPS for Barrhead. I always set the GPS because it's a back-up and a double-check, but I navigate mainly with the map so I can stay proficient at that. This time I had to keep three big lakes on my left and then cross over the Pembina River just south of Barrhead. We were there in no time since we had a decent tailwind. I joined the circuit and did a pretty nice landing.

I recorded the times, reset the GPS, and took off again. The flight back was beautiful, too, even though we had an incredible headwind! It was smooth but our ground speed was 60-70 knots, in a plane that normally cruises around 100 kts. It felt like we were crawling. We joked about whether we'd have enough fuel for the hours it would take to get back or whether we'd make it in time for the next rental.

I switched back to the tower frequency a little over halfway there, just to be ready, but a few minutes later, I decided to make a position report on the enroute frequency since we were still a ways out and it seemed like it might be forever before we got back at that ground speed! Silly me, though, I had forgotten that I had switched over and I made the broadcast on the tower frequency. In the moment that it dawned on me: "Juliet Juliet Lima, this is the Villeneuve tower frequency." Me: "Tower, I just realized that. My apologies." Thankfully, there was nobody else on the radio so it was probably just a laugh for ATC. 😜

When I contacted Tower again a few minutes later - this time for real! - I was cleared straight in for Runway 16 and did another perfectly fine landing.

This was really a great flight! I felt good about how I performed (except for that silly radio thing but that was minor). We talked and soaked in the views. I enjoyed being a pilot today and my dad enjoyed coming along!