Brisbane Scenic and the flight home
Flight hours: 5.2
Study hours: 0
Aviation Reading: None
Wade and I decided to take a leisurely scenic flight around Brisbane and the islands before I had to finalise my preparation to depart for Sydney.
There is a published VFR track that takes you south of the city, over to Stradbroke island, tracking north to Moreton island before crossing water to the west for Bribie island and finally now being north of the city, returning to Archerfield.
There were some interesting colours to be seen, the coast and islands looked great from the air. Pity about the low cloud which reduced picture clarity.
During some of the island hopping, I decided to provide Wade with a taste of what a zero G environment feels like. Seeing as I still had the sound recorder hooked up, I decided to record the experience. You can listen to it here (Warning: Contains Explicit Language).
On the return trip to Sydney, I decided to re-record most of the radio conversations again for my Student Pilot Training podcast listeners. This is because I totally screwed up major portions of the radio conversations on the first trip by failing to ensure that the unit was able to record at the correct volume and also because I needed better settings to transfer the recordings to my laptop.
The weather ahead looked like it wanted me to make a diversion back to Byron Bay, where my friends Bill and John were still staying. No drama, diversion adventures crop up occasionally when flying light aircraft.
The cloud cover was getting increasingly lower than forecast and I had to transit the Gold Coast Class C airspace at 1,500 ft, whilst dodging small areas of rain.
The cloud cover was lighter and higher when passing Byron Bay, which saw me climb to 6,500 ft. Visually ahead however, the clouds looked broken to overcast, below my current altitude, covered the entire horizon and extended one hundred miles or more.
I didn't want to find myself above an overcast and unable to descend when needed. Calling up Flightwatch, I was informed that Sydney has unlimited VFR. I decided to fly VFR on top, using the breaks in the cloud every few minutes to maintain visual tracking along with using navigational aids to backup my track made good.
Passing Coffs Habour, the clouds started to clear over the coast and I was able to maintain 6,500 ft for most of the trip home.
The Bankstown ATIS on my return had the wind at 05010G20KT. That means the wind was coming from 50 degrees, at 10 knots gusting to 20kt. The ATIS broadcast crosswind maximum was at 18kts, 3 knots higher than my Cessna 172's crosswind limitation.
The landing was quite interesting, having to adjust the aircraft at all stages of the circuit for landing. The flare, landing and roll out all required correct crosswind technique, otherwise it may have been an unhappy landing.
Flying between Sydney and Brisbane is quite fun in terms of the radio work, the number of differing airspace areas and the different weather patterns you may encounter. I would recommend it to any private pilot for flying, radio and decision making experience.
