Pilot Life: Solo Cross-Country to Roseburg

It looks like inclement weather for flying is returning real soon, so that means flying will become spotty once again. Hopefully, there will still be enough good weather days ahead to allow me to get the ratings I'm currently pursuing... Today was a great day for flying, so I took advantage of it by doing a quick solo cross-country flight down to Roseburg, an airport surrounded by some terrain that my uncle and I have flown into before.

Solo flight to Roseburg in N5174E!

It was an uneventful flight, which is how I like it; it was just me, my own thoughts, and the airplane. I picked up VFR Flight Following through Cascade Approach who handed me off to Seattle Center and navigated VFR southbound with the southern Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain ranges as my backdrop. I made a full-stop landing on Runway 34 at Roseburg and then taxied back before getting airborne again. As always with a solo outing, I practiced my Single-pilot Resource Management skills through visual cues, ADS-B usage, and monitoring instruments and engine gauges, keeping me busy as I made way back and forth between origin and round-robin destination.

I safely landed back at Albany, where I refueled the plane and then taxied it back to my uncle's hangar, where I put it away.

Looking back the past few months and the past year, I've come a long way in terms of logging hours; I have over 100 hours in the Cessna 172 at this point and I am well-over 250 flight hours logged at this point, which was hard to believe at first! Last year, I was still a student pilot struggling to get ready for my Private Pilot checkride and I was at around 70 hours total. As far as hours are concerned, the year 2018 is a stark contrast compared to the hellish year of 2017!