X-COUNTRY

I was once asked to explain what a cross country is and since that was a long time ago I will give a brief definition. A Cross Country is a flight which requires a Flight Plan to be filed with a controlling agency and has one leg consisting of 50nm or more with a landing at the destination airport. This past Wednesday I flew one down to Alexandria, MN (147nm) a quaint little town which resides next to Lake Ida, where I only spent a few minutes on the runway and then was on my way up to Fergus Falls, MN (FFM) or so I thought . . . when my instructor who goes by Chris thought it would be a good time to shut down one of our two Lycoming O-360 engines which caused the aircraft to momentarily bank out of control which I as the student had to quickly correct for. After recovering control of the aircraft and upon completion of the emergency procedure checklist I circled back to AXN for a single engine approach to landing. A turn from Downwind to base and a turn from base to final brought me down to earth again, I cleaned the aircraft configuration for takeoff and away we were.

The route to FFM was relatively uneventful besides my instructor not letting me use any navigation instruments except the Heading Indicator. Fergus is still a part of Minnesota which makes it infinitely prettier than any part of North Dakota. I soon found myself winding my way back home to Grand Forks or as some of my fans call it "Royal Forks"(royal hehe ; ). It was a fun flight nothing big, it took us 2.8hrs to fly and that includes all the taxi times so not bad. Some of you might want to here about my 4.5hr, 250nm cross country coming up so check back in a week or two to see how that went and I might even have some pictures to go with it. If the weather cooperates I hope to fly over to Minneapolis, MN to catch a nice dinner and some of that big town atmosphere?

Sorry no pictures this time, they would have been great if I had bothered to take some. I flew the glass Seminole which has two computer screens to display all of the instruments you would have liked seeing that I think. Maybe next time.