Flying around Calgary
This past Christmas, Caitlin gave me a most excellent present of a gift certificate for a 1 hour Discovery Flight at the Calgary Flight Training Centre. I was waiting for some nice weather, so last week I booked my hour for this morning at 11am.
After going through the checklists, the instructor and I headed out to the runway in the Diamond Katana. There was a decent wind of about 13 knots coming from the south, so we departed from runway 16 ahead of an WestJet flight coming in on final. As we were cleared for takeoff the instructor said that I would be controlling the aircraft for takeoff, so I grabbed the flight stick and pulled back a bit, and we were airborne.
After takeoff we headed west, just north of downtown where I had a great view of the Shaw building where I work. When we reached 5500 feet, I took control again and kept us in a straight line towards Priddis Corner/Bragg Creek. As we left the Calgary Terminal airspace, we were handed off to Springbank and we climbed to 6000. Upon reaching Priddis Corner, we took a right turn towards the mountains and the instructor let me try some turns. After my turns, he asked if I’d like to see what a sharp turn felt like, so he took control and did a 45 degree turn to the left followed by a 60 degree turn to the right. Then he asked if I had ever felt zero gravity, which I replied “only on a roller coaster once”. Soon thereafter we were nose-down towards the ground for several seconds, experiencing zero gravity.
Once we completed these maneuvers, we made the turn back towards Calgary following the Banff highway. As we entered Calgary Terminal airspace we were instructed to descend to 5000 from 6000, so the instructor showed me what a ’slip’ is like where we dropped about 800 feet within 5 seconds and then leveled out at 5000. We were then cleared to land on runway 10 which gave us a great view of several other aircraft taking off on runway 16. After an hour of flying, we were back on the ground. Now I’ll just have to start saving up to get my private pilot’s license!
Kudos to Caitlin for the awesome gift!
That sounded like the most awesome experience for you!! I’m so glad you got to do it. You should seriously be a pilot…
And that cockpit is so bleeping small. But still pretty cool, even for a flying phobic like me!!!
miss you guys!!!
Comment by Julie — May 20, 2007 @ 9:10 pmIt’s a dream come true for you!
How did it compare to the flight sim? Did it feel any different? (except for the 0g. That would have felt different…)
Comment by Andrew — May 21, 2007 @ 12:51 am