Westward Ho!

I didn’t fly this week, mostly because I have been too busy at work. Hopefully that changes soon. However, this past weekend, I did take a short trip to visit family in Denver, CO. The real highlight of the trip was the flight to and from Denver. Um….I mean…..VISITING FAMILY of course! My wife & I flew out of CAK (Akron-Canton) (see Runway diagram) on a direct flight to DEN on Frontier Airlines.

CAK was quite a nice airport to fly out of…imagine, if you will…a terminal the size of a local supermarket with about 6-8 departure gates. It was very quick to park, the staff was friendly, and the security line only had about 3-4 people in it. After boarding the plane, we were #1 for takeoff (I’m assuming that the A319 with a scheduled flight plan took priority over the random VFR student pilot). Climbout from CAK was towards the east, on runway 5, with a sharp left-hand turn to avoid CLE airspace. Since Frontier has a live map on channel 13 at every seat, I could monitor location, groundspeed, and altitude. After completing a quick turn to a heading of about 270 (west), we flew at about 250-270mph, and 4000ft (~300ftAGL) for about 5 minutes or so. (see excerpt from Ohio Sectional below)

The pilot then applied more power and we climbed to about 9000ft and maintained about 270-290mph for at least the next 10-15 minutes. Around Mansfield, we climbed to 20,000ft and held, but only had about 350-400kts airspeed. It was only at about the Ohio-Indiana border that we increased power and climbed out to FL390 and increased our speed to about 480-520mph.

I understand the quick turn and the measures to avoid CLE, but why fly at 9000ft on a westerly heading across northern Ohio? I’ve flown with my dad across this flight path at about 8500ft, so it is possible that a pilot on VFR could be close to a commercial flightpath from CAK.

It was a beautiful day, and the skies cleared out near the Iowa/Illinois border. Visibility was excellent, and I could clearly see our flight path as we followed I-80 across Iowa and Nebraska. It was fun to look out the window and see the railway of the transcontinental railroad and the slow-moving caravans of train cars making their way across the great plains. I enjoyed the perspective from 39,000ft, but suddenly became hungry to explore those roadways again by car and by foot.

It was also a great day for picking up other aircraft - it made me wish that I had a nice digital SLR with a 300mm lens, so that I could get some nice resolution on air-to-air shots. I saw a FedEx DC-10 cross underneath, a KLM 747, a AA MD-80, and this UAL 777 that followed us for about 10 minutes, then descended and accelerated (I'm assuming that they had a better slot at Denver then we did).

Landing in Denver was fairly straightforward. We flew downwind to pick up runway 35R (the east-most runway at DEN), and I could just pick up the glide-slope indicator lights showing that we were on the 3° glideslope just as we turned to final. We taxied to gate A32 and deplaned. Then I got to drive into the blinding Denver sun on I-70, while watching out for the yuppies in their BMW X5’s and sorority girls in their Jettas (sorry, Sam). The lighting was awesome for photos, however...

Staying with family was great – and we stayed with my wife’s cousin (my cousin-in-law) and did all sorts of fun things. We went up into the mountains near Mt. Evans (Echo Lake), had BeauJo’s pizza, watched a pee-wee soccer game, went to a inner-city church on Sunday evening, played several all-out light-saber duels with a very tenacious 3-yr old and a very imaginative 6 yr old. I happened to have a strange recollection of several lines (search your feelings….Obi-wan never told you…let your hate flow through you….etc.) which made the duels even more authentic. I managed to get disoriented (NOT LOST) in a rainy Denver late at night, which made one 9 yr old girl very concerned and one 29 yr old girl very frustrated.

It snowed like a mother on Sunday evening and Monday. This was awesome! About 4 inches fell in Denver, and there was more up in the mountains and the plains were swamped with snow. Too bad that I didn’t have my snowboard! Our flight out was delayed due to all the snow by about 5 hours, which meant that I didn’t get back in to CAK until about 4:30AM. Tack on a 1-1/2 hr drive and I was looking at 1hr of sleep before work. I decided that if I went to sleep I would never wake up. So, there I went….like a zombie…to work. Should’ve slept. Correction. Should’ve skipped the flight, quit my job, moved into a storage shed in Dillon, worked at a ski lift by day and pizza shop by night and boarded all the time. Yeah.