After flying the route three times with an instructor, today was my chance to fly it alone.

Pre-flight planning checks complete, I walked out to the plane to do my A-check. Everything looked good so I completed the paperwork, phoned the tower to book-out, and got started.

The wind was fairly calm, so each leg would take approximately the same amount of time. I was soon up in the air, at about 2,200ft. Cloud base was at around 2,400ft and whilst it looked like a lovely, clear sunny day from the ground, there was a noticable amount of haze up at that height. Visibility was around 10km so it wouldn’t be a problem, but it was an interesting learning to see how things can be so different on the ground.

The flight proceeded to plan and everything went well. I missed ‘Student’ from a couple of my radio calls (and was quickly corrected by the tower!) but apart from that I was happy with how things went.