Flight Time–UCF Flyover

For the past week, I've wanted to go flying after work, but Hurricane Debby had other plans. The weather was impacted for the entire week, as the storm passed by far to the west and then north of Melbourne. Today, we decided to go to the airport and see if we could get a short flight in before the weather got worse in the afternoon. I also wanted to try out the Garmin Pilot app, since my Foreflight subscription is going to expire next month.

We departed Valkaria around 10:00 AM, amongst several other planes. The clouds were low, and I wasn't sure if we'd even leave the traffic pattern. I took off from Runway 28 and turned crosswind and downwind. While flying east, I decided to continue to the coast and fly south. As we approached Sebastian, I decided that the clouds were low enough to climb over, so I did a climbing 180 degree turn and headed back to the north. We continued to the north and found that the clouds were much less dense to the northwest.

At this point, I decided to go fly over the University of Central Florida. I've been planning to do this someday, and today seemed like as good a time as any. We were above the scattered clouds, so I found a long gap in the clouds and descended through it until we were underneath. We then followed US 50 west towards Orlando. We were now below the Orlando Class B airspace, so I was busy keeping my eyes open for traffic and was careful to maintain my altitude below 1,300 feet. We passed by the Bithlo Towers and turned north towards campus. As I flew along, Andrew took lots of pictures.

The University of Central Florida (UCF)

We continued along the west side of campus, then turned east back towards the coast. Again, I had to be very aware of the Bithlo Towers.

The University of Central Florida (UCF)

As we turned south, I found that the clouds were much taller than they were when we departed. I continued to climb beyond 6,500 feet to avoid getting too close to the towering columns. Once we passed by Melbourne, I was able to start descending. Once past Valkaria, I found another large gap in the clouds and descended through it. I entered the traffic pattern and landed on Runway 28.

My experience with Garmin Pilot was not great. I was unable to set the view the way that I wanted. When I was flying east after departure, the map did not update. I was so frustrated that I exited the app and loaded Foreflight. As expected, Foreflight crashed within one minute. This has been an issue since day one. I turned off the Bluetooth connection to the GDL-39 and restarted Foreflight. It worked fine for the remainder of the flight. I really don't know what to do about Foreflight. I can try to upgrade to a newer iPad Mini, or I can switch to Garmin Pilot. I'll have to give Garmin Pilot a few more tries before I give up on it because a new iPad Mini is more than I want to spend, and it may not solve the problem with the Bluetooth connection.

The flight track is shown below.

Flight Time: 2.2 hours
Total Time: 609 hours