The weather across the south east has been less than
desirable the past two weeks. It was only last weekend that the sky cleared up allowing for some
VFR time building to occur. Last Sunday my buddy Matt and I hopped in the redneck killer and blasted off to
Gulfport (
Biloxi) Mississippi. We are both in
IFR training and are trying to build up both our simulated instrument and x-country PIC time. The trip to Mississippi was a solid 5.8 hours. With that we both can log the whole flight as PIC x-country and half of it as simulated instrument time. (one of us has to be under the hood) It was a great day and a great flight. The weather was perfect... well, the 20 knot headwind on the way home kind of sucked but hey, we're building time right!
So the trip west was great. I was flying the first leg down the coast. First we shot over to
KPFN, then to
KDTS to stay in the
VFR corridor near
Eglin AFB. From
Destin we flew to
KNPA which is the Pensacola Naval Air Station, home of the Blue Angels. We stayed above their airspace at 7500 ft. and continued on to
KGPT our final destination.
Shot of Pensalcola Naval Air Station from 8,500 ft.
Here's a zoomed in shot of the ramp. If you look closely you can see 3 of the Blue Angels A/C including the famous Fat Albert C-130.After shutting down we walked into the FBO and we're given the keys to the crew car. Sure beats paying for a cab! We drove down the coast to the Beau Rivage Hotel & Casino to have lunch and maybe get lucky at the tables. I opted not to indulge (after all, I am already in dept thanks to this flight training stuff) but Matt threw $300 on black at the roulette tables and won!
Here's the big winner! Always bet on black!So after our little gambling excursion, Matt treated me to lunch at the Beau's rather lavish lunch Buffet with his winnings. It was excellent! Next time I'm gonna win big and lunch will be on me.
All in all we spent about an hour and a half maybe two hours over in Mississippi before we got airborne again. The Flight home was Matt's and unfortunately we were seeing ground speeds of around 88 kts. Miserable! But like I said before, we are both trying to build our time up so we shrugged it off and kept on trucking.
The flying was pretty uneventful minus a oil pressure gauge that was malfunctioning. The oil pressure sat at the bottom of the green arc on the gauge the whole trip. Not too big a deal as long as its in the green, but it kept us on our toes. We touched back down in good ole' Tallahassee around 4:30pm EST and had been gone almost 8 hours. It was a great trip I will not soon forget.
The Matt's
Nice Tallahassee Sunset 
