Lesson 102 – A Short Solo

I went out for an hour yesterday just so I wouldn’t get too stale before my checkride. I did a couple steep turns and some slow flight but, mostly, I just flew around for fun. The thing was though, I gave up on the flight right after takeoff.

As I took off on runway 5, I saw a dense fog bank right over the lake shore just east of the airport. My first thought was that if that fog moved over the airport, there would be no way that I could get back in. I considered just staying in the pattern so that I could get back on the ground if I needed to but, the tower told an arriving aircraft that the fog had been there for a while and didn’t seem to be moving any closer to the field. I decided to go just outside the class D airspace and keep a close eye on the fog from there. If it moved any closer at all, I would go back immediately. As it turned out, the fog was in exactly the same place an hour later. I was over the lake but stopped abruptly at the shoreline.