Kate's Aviation Journal

With flight planning help from Mickey the cat, Jim and I and our friend Tony took a trip to Reedsburg and Richland Center today to look at some Ercoupes. In Reedsburg, we needed to wait for a key to a hangar, so we went to lunch across the street and then flew over to Richland Center for a while. We stopped at Reedsburg again on the way back. It was pretty cold outside but toasty warm in the plane. It was nice to fly around for fun.

Recently, frozen Lake Winnebago was covered in white, but recent rain and wind ended that for now.

Today was another one of those picture-perfect winter flying days. It was beautiful for a long trip to northwestern Iowa in the morning. On the way back in the evening, I got to see one of my favorite things in all of flying: a snowy landscape brightly lit by a full moon. I managed to get a picture of the moon rising behind some high clouds as the sun was setting behind us.

Winter weather changes so often that it's great to get calm, clear days like this. It was a good chance for a student to start learning takeoffs and landings this afternoon.

It was cold, cold, cold on my first trip in the 182. Des Moines welcomed us yesterday with below-zero wind chills. Hey, I'll take the cold if it means there won't be a cloud in the sky. There is supposed to be a snowstorm coming but we had great timing for this trip -- nothing but clear skies. The temperature didn't even get above zero before we left for the return flight this afternoon. Gotta love getting towed out of a heated hangar while sitting in the airplane!

After my checkout in December, I read Max Trescott's G1000 Glass Cockpit Handbook to better understand all the little details of the 182's avionics. I must say that is a good book and I would recommend it to anyone learning the G1000. It is like the regular G1000 manual but written in a different style. In order to review instrument approaches and put some of the book's tips and tricks into practice, I took a local flight with a safety pilot before this trip to Iowa.