Saturday, July 19, 2008

Crowded along the shoreline


I took my sister up to fly over Chicago the other day. This is the same sister they lives in France, and whom we've visited by plane a couple of times from the Netherlands. This time she was here, and interested to see a bit of the Midwest corn fields (she's a vet).
Beautiful sunny day, early morning we went up from PWK and flew northeast to Lake Zurich. Beautiful! She flew quite well, and was happy to do some steep turns over the lake. Then heading back towards the coast, we descended to 3500 ft to stay below class B and above Kenosha's class D.

It was very busy along the coast as we flew south along the shore. I asked for flight following but was denied at first (too busy) but accepted a few minutes later (after I heard the guy behind me get accepted!). Traffic call-outs were fast and frequent, and my sister barely had time to look at the skyline. She did take a couple of really nice pictures though.

On the way back north we flew parallel to and slightly faster than another Cessna, which is always uncomfortable. At one point, there were 4 planes close to each other, and I really wished I had my Zaon Portable Collision Avoidance System with me, but unfortunately I had it sent in for repair. ATC gave a general 'be careful, lots of planes around your location' and suddenly we saw a Diamond coming from the north, same altitude, maybe 1000 ft to our right. Just in time to know we were not on a collision course, but still kinda scary.

Just around that time we were abeam PWK and turned inland. An Eclipse called Palwaukee tower as well, and ATC asked us to keep the speed up to allow for the jet behind us. The Eclipse called back, somewhat embarresed, that they were a Diamond Eclipse doing 80kts on final, not a jet, and we slowed down for a normal (and quite nice!) landing.
My sister really enjoyed the flight. So we'll take her up again when she comes back here, which I hope is soon!

1 comment:

Sheetal Budhraj said...

Hey, thats some flying experience...and the aerial shot was lovely...must be something to fly..It can give you a kick when you're flying so high up, and looking down below...what a sense of power you must be feeling
...great blog...your travel experiences are great...

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