Flight Planning can be fun......

I signed up for the weather service provided by DUATS, the other day, and this morning I woke up to find access to their website in my inbox. What a really incredible tool! I just wish they would let me do some work on how the site looks :) Sinve Ive been working on doing some flight planning, with the assistance of Rod Machados' book, and the trusty old handbook for the e6b, I should now be able to produce a fully functional flight plan.....

I decided that for the first flight plan, Id go ahead and do the example straight out of the book. WOW, not only is it an area Im familiar with, but the airport Im based out of, how cool is that! The e6b seems to be able to compute any value known to man, assuming you know how to read it right (which takes some practice I might add), but after about an hour or so I manage to plan a 33 minute flight. A little later, I had a great idea. I thought to my self, wouldnt it be neat to take all this planning and be able to fly it right now? I THINK I CAN! Plug the winds aloft values into flight sim, and we should be good to go!.

Once inside flight sim, I selected healdsburg as the departure, and using the 'advanced' weather tab, you can set what ever meterological condition your heart desires. In this case I set winds aloft and temp info to match my flight plan Id just completed. Using only my sectional and times/checkpoints on my flightplan, I navigated to the nut tree with hardly any problems. It turned out I needed a little more right course correction than Id planned for, but using virtual pilotage skills, I was able to find the field with no issues. It was nice to see that from planning to virtual implementaion I was able to successfully navigate to and from the areas of my choice. I hope it goes this well in real life.

Im still looking at headsets, but I know the David Clarks are still the ones to buy for my budget right now. Just need to pull the trigger on that, but money just seems to go oh so quickly with hobbies.........