Talking and Flying

After a nice weekend in Amsterdam for a break, I got back in the air today for my final long cross-country solo near the end of flight school. Fortunately, it went without a hitch. I landed for the first time at Hradec Kralove airport, which has a really long, beautiful paved runway, and then at Most airport, where I'd landed a few weeks ago with my instructor. Most is in a beautiful setting, surrounded by hills, and is really a nice airport to fly into on a beautiful day.

On the way back to Sazena, I made some calls on my phone and captured this pic while doing so. It's illegal to talk on a cell phone while you drive in most of Europe, but it's not while flying a plane. Fortunately the Piper Archer III that I normally fly is quiet enough inside that you can use a cellphone; also the headsets the school supply hurt my ears, so I was using the microphone and the loudspeaker for radio communication.

Normally I have to fly pretty close to the ground for the visual navigation flights (also to stay under some controlled airspaces), but today in order to get to Most I had to climb to get over some hills, so I climbed to 3,500 feet, which is the highest I've flown so far when flying solo. It sounds pretty low, but for me it was really cool to get up that high, as I climbed well before I to the hills, since I knew exactly where I was and where I was going (and I knew I was not under any controlled airspaces with a low ceiling).

Was a great day, now I have 2 hours and 40 minutes left of flights through controlled airspaces with my instructors, and then the official hours for the flight school syllabus are complete.