Tuesday, February 21, 2006

KHFY to KRID

The weather was nice again today so I had the chance to make a quick flight after I finished up a few meetings. About 4:30 I got off the ground and headed from Greenwood to Richmond Municipal Airport, just on the Indiana side of the Ohio border, and more or less due East of Indianapolis.

I headed out from Greenwood to the Shelbyville VOR (not very far), and then took straight vector to Richmond, which has it's own VOR as well. It gave me a chance to practice a little VOR navigation on the way there, and some simple pilotage on the return trip (in layman's terms, that means navigating by looking at a map and the ground to figure out where you are).

It's a short 120 nm round-trip, and I made it twice during my training -- so to say I had to rely strictly on these navigation techniques is a bit of a stretch, since I was familiar with the route already. The point was to use something besides my fancy-pants GPS and prove that I won't be a basketcase should it ever crap out on me.

For some reason, I've never seen anyone else flying around this airport, despite 2 intersecting 5500' x 100' runways (and a third that's no longer in use). The runways seem a bit dilapidated, which is a shame given that it seems like it could be a pretty nice little airport.

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