Flying to Fort St. John
In a couple of weeks I’m flying a friend up to Fort St. John. It’s a good fit. I like doing cross-country trips and want to build hours and he needs to go up north to do some quick fixes for a client. And I’ve never been north of Athabasca, so it’s also a chance to visit some new airports too.
I’ve already basically planned the route, using VORs only so as to practice my navigation skills. But since I’ve never been to CYXJ I thought that perhaps I would do a mock flight on FlightGear. It’s not that I don’t have faith in my abilities to read a map or navigate to the airport, it’s just that it’s always nice to know what things will be like when you get there. In the Army we called that a recce; at the very least you did a map recce by looking over your map but an actual recce was always preferred.
So the best way for me to do a somewhat realistic recce was to do the route on FlightGear, which has surprisingly realistic terrain. Though since the flight from Springbank is just over four hours, I skipped the long cross-country and just started the flight from Dawson Creek, which is only 20 minutes flying time away. The result? Basically the same as I had pictured things in my mind from looking at the map, only the computer did it all for me, validating my mental picture. Is it helpful? I think it is, so long as you don’t get over confident in your plan (since you’ve flown it on the simulator multiple times) that when things don’t go as you expect that you don’t know what to do.
Thu, 31 Mar 2005 03:33 Posted in Flying
