First and last

I attended my first fly in today, to an airport I’d never been to before, Collinwood (CNY3). Cute little place with the obligatory Greasy Spoon Restaurant serving up fine pilot fuel.

I wasn’t flying myself, that task was taken care of by S (the guy I flew around lake Scugog). My role was that of first officer and navigator.

This isn’t as glamourous as it sounds. As far as I can tell the role of the first officer is to ensure that she has received a text from the pilot that morning that he is awake and out of bed, if not she is to call said pilot.

As far as navigating goes, her job is to intently start at the IPad as the little plane follows the magenta line. To be fair it’s not as if the pilot is doing any flying either, he just pushes the buttons and the plane, in turn, also obediently follows the aforementioned magenta line! Oh the joys of a GPS and autopilot.*

So my first fly in, and don’t let the title fool you, I don’t want it to be my last either.

The last refers to the fact that we had a little bit of a headwind.

 Actually we had a lot of a headwind. 

At one point we were 110 KIAS and about 56 Knots ground speed! Couple that with the fact that some of the guys are flying shiny Cirrus’s  (Cirri?) and well lets just say they’d ordered and eaten before we had even landed!

* this is totally flippant and completely unfair on S who did a much better job of hand flying than the single axis autopilot did, we were playing with shiny toys really!