I took my friend Denny up in the plane today. He was a flight attendant in a previous career so he was no stranger to airplanes but this happened to be his first time in a small airplane.
It was a bit windy, 16 knots gusting to 24 from the southwest. KOSU made that just extra easy by having a nice runway heading the same direction.
We took off from runway 23 and proceeded to meander our way around northwest Columbus before contacting ATC to coordinate a little sight seeing over campus and downtown.
Denny got a nice shot of the Oval and a piece of high street.
Since we were right in the way of departing traffic from the big airport, we scurried south a bit to take a loop around downtown Columbus.
This is a shot Denny took from just west of the city. The Scioto River is the beautiful brown waterway running through the shot.
After playing around the city, it was time to get out of the path of departing traffic and play around with the clouds.
Clouds were at around 10,000 feet today so we spent about 15 minutes climbing to that height over Delaware, Ohio.
Then it was time to let Denny have the controls. As an ex flight-attendant, he was a natural. No fear of the plane. Just comfortably put us in a few unusual attitudes on accident that I had to correct so we didn’t die.
Sun was setting. Time to get home. Wind was coming down just a little bit but still a bit gusty. Since the plane is so small and gets kicked around by even relatively light winds, we did a no-flap landing at a little faster speed in order to have a little more rudder authority.
Fun day in the plane!