Archive for the ‘IFR Flights’ Category

Flight log 9/11/2011
Yet another great flight that I am just getting around to logging; I am starting to feel like I need a staff writer.

This was my second trip to the falls and as mentioned in my previous post I really wanted to take my son along, but this time Steven had a birthday party to attend to so yet again he was going to miss this flight. Ya never know, third time may be the trick! Read the rest of this entry »

Flight log 5/22/2011 I am quite a bit behind on my write-ups lately. Work and family life has been beyond crazy lately. I assure you I have been flying

This weekend’s mission was a visit to the Air and Space Museum at Dulles airport in Chantilly, Virginia with the Princeton Flying Tigers. Stephen T, his friend Nadeem and I would be flying our Cessna 172sp during this trip. 0TH isn’t the fastest bird in the fleet but she is the best equipped with a moving map MFD an HSI and two-axis Autopilot the only thing we are missing is on-board weather. Read the rest of this entry »

Write-up in progress.. Here are some pictures from the trip. Read the rest of this entry »

Flight log 4/9/2011

Eric from the flying club asked if I could fly with him to Johnstown PA so he could see his family. Always up for some flying time and an opportunity to fly with another pilot, I agreed. The plan was to depart after work on Friday and return solo that same night. Initial flight planning had the flight time around 2 hours each way, so it would be a long day for me.

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Flight log 2/17/2011: The forecast was right! Winter was going to take a day off on Thursday so I decided to book my old friend 4757t for some flying time. Now what to do and where to go? Due to the weather in the Northeast I haven’t flown much so I decided to request a Safety pilot from the flying club for some IFR work. Mike D responded first so after a few emails we were scheduled for a flight at 4:30PM.

I filed KMMU to KMGJ on fltplan.com printed my nav-log and grabbed the iPad. The winds were favoring 21 but it would be late enough to fit in for a practice ILS3 approach to what traffic might be around, if not we could always break it off and circle to land.

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By Matt Kreilein,

Being a scientist, I’m always interested in collecting data random as it may be.

Today I drove to Schenectady NY to fly with my old CFII for some instrument work. I like to make the trip up 1-2 times a year to fly with him and/or to reconnect with old friends from when I worked in Albany. Today, I decided to wear a GPS watch and HR monitor (standard marathoner training gear) just to see if anything happened. I actually meant to do this last night but forgot the HR monitor at home. It would have been interesting to see the spike in my HR when just at wheels up I saw a groundhog run across Rwy 24 at KPNE at the farthest point of where the landing light reaches ahead of you in 0TH. Read the rest of this entry »

Flight log 10/8/2010 Niagara Falls:
11/29/2010 Sorry for the late post on this one:
As of late I have been very busy getting ready for our new baby due in November. This has led to less time flying and for the website; at least I had this flight to look forward to.

Back in August one of my fellow flying club members Mike D had asked if I would like to plan a trip to Niagara Falls in our Cessna 182RG. Needless to say I decided to go. Read the rest of this entry »

Flight log 8/21/2010

I had originally planned to take a trip to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend but when I started receiving emails from the FAA regarding upcoming TFRs for President Obama’s planned vacation I figured I should make other plans.

Earlier in the week Gary from the Northeast Flyers had invited me to his lunch run at Georgetown DE. As always it would give me one more chance to meet some fellow pilots and explore a new airport so I made the call to go for it. All I had to do now was figure out who I was going to take. My wife isn’t much of a flyer, so unless we were going on a real trip I wasn’t even going to try. Her friend expressed interest but at the time I was still waiting on responses from some of my fellow pilot friends. As I got the answers back it started to look more and more like this trip was going to be with my son. After all Steven loves to fly with his daddy so all in all not a bad deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it really came down to the wire on this one but at 16:00 local we made the final GO call for our trip to Oshkosh this year. We had delayed the trip due to conditions at the north 40 aircraft parking grounds since we are flying in Frank’s Cirrus SR22 and the wheel pants go for around $2000 each! But everything changed when I got a last minute hard surface parking reservation at the Baslier FBO. So as of now we are a go for launch!

I will post facebook updates so check in using our facebook page to the right. We are departing tomorrow morning Friday 7/30.

Lots of pictures and video to come

Yet another chance to meet-up with my fellow pilot friend Gary http://gmflightlog.blogspot.com of the Northeast Flyers and also get some more IFR experience along the way. I had originally planned to fly our Cessna 182RG since I had just earned my complex / high performance endorsements and logged the required 10 hours in the aircraft, but due to a failure of the gear warning system the aircraft was grounded so we took our trusty friend N159SP. Read the rest of this entry »

Flight log 6/25/2010

This was our second attempt at our dinner flight to Hamilton NY. During the last flight we made the call to divert to Lincoln Park due ATC routing and a wicked headwind. This time things would go more smoothly, well at least we hoped it would. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday 6/7 my friend and fellow flying club member Stephen asked if I would like to fly to Hamilton NY for dinner on Friday night. As I am always looking for a chance to fly under the hood and check out new places I agreed.

The original plan was to leave work and head directly to the airport but since I left my camera and change of clothes at home I stopped by the house on the way. As soon as I got in I saw my son. I was hoping to avoid running into him since he always makes me feel bad about flying without him. What can I say, he loves spending time with his daddy and his daddy loves spending time with him. Sure enough, after checking with Stephen to make sure it would be ok to take my son I quickly got him ready and ran to the car just in time for rush hour traffic!

On our way to the airport I called Stephen and asked him to get the airplane ready. I wanted to fly IFR on the first leg since there was an overcast layer at about 4000 feet. As I pulled into the airport Stephen informed me that he was still waiting on fuel and on top of that my overcast layer was quickly breaking up. Read the rest of this entry »

While in route to Martha’s Vineyard my friend and fellow flying club member Stephen and I experienced an alternator controller failure (basically a voltage regulator). It wasn’t a big deal since we were in day visual conditions and the engine does not require electrical power to operate. I have learned a few things from watching the video.. Read the rest of this entry »

Ocean City MD
One of the most common questions I am asked as a pilot is “what is the furthest place you have flown to?” If you are a pilot you know what I mean and after being a pilot for 9 years you would think I would have some really cool answer but actually I didn’t. During the years I had made a few flights to locations such as Nashua NH, Manassas VA, and Providence RI with other pilots but since they did the flight planning and most of the flying I considered myself more of a passenger than a crew member. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally some IMC!
After all of  my IFR flight training you would expect to see some actual IMC (instrument meteorological conditions) flight time in my log book, but after about 42 hours of IFR time there wasn’t much. Just a few flights at altitude in and out of the cloud layer, not what I would consider IMC. Well yesterday I made up for some of that. I didn’t think my simulated instrument time provided enough experience to just hop in the plane solo, takeoff into the soup and fly an approach to minimums; so I opted to fly with an instructor. After calling the flight school the dispatcher let me know that one of the instructors would head up to the airport in about an Read the rest of this entry »