My prediction for the weather held true and there was no flying to be had today. Well, no real flying, anyway… but my instructor and I still took a short trip thanks to the Redbird FMX simulator.
I continued my navigation practice by flying a short hop through the mountains of Vermont — from Rutland-Southern Vermont Regional (RUT) to Lebanon (LEB).
Just to make things interesting, my instructor set me up with some gusty winds and reduced my visibility to just a few miles. This underscored how legal minimums aren’t always safe — even though a daytime VFR flight has a legal visibility minimum of 3 statute miles, the sim made it clear how quickly you close that distance in a plane (even a relatively slow one). I definitely wouldn’t want to be flying in these conditions at this early stage in my aviation career!
I used VORs and an NDB to navigate between the two airports, entered and flew a left traffic pattern at LEB, and landed the “plane” safely. All in all, a pretty good lesson (especially since the sim has a pause button so my CFI can stop the action and point out items of interest…I wish we had that in the real plane!
Simulator time today: 0.9 hours
Total simulator time to date: 1.6 hours