Introduction

In September 2004 I came to Atlanta, USA for WebSphere Portal training. During this week almost every day I went to airport directly after class to fly a little.

This time it was Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, KPDK. It's class D airport, with 4 runways and lot's of closed runways/taxiways due to construction. Bad thing is that due to lot's of traffic it takes about 30 minutes to takeoff, which costs money. And lots of "radio-jams" - hard to get through to say anything on ground and tower frequencies.  I did quick checkout in C172, which took one hour.

After checkout I had flown to see lakes north east of airport.

There was also something unique - I though about flying a helicopter, but those were just "someday" thoughs (but I bought and read "Rotorcraft Flying Manual"). And guess what? I was driving to pilot shop when I saw helicopter in the corner of airport and helicopter flight school just next to them. I scheduled "discovery flight" immidiately and then managed to get another lesson before leaving. Now that's fun! Here is a comment I wrote to rec.aviation.rotorcraft after helicopter flighs.

I also created composite video from few 20 second video shots done while flying.

Each day after training I was driving to the airport, so few ground based photos.

My last trip was around Stone Mountain to nearby airport to do some touch-and-goes. I had to wait 45(!!!) minutes in queue behing big jets.

Flying activity:

• 19 Sep: 1.0hr - checkout in C172
• 19 Sep: 1.2hr - short trip northeast to see nearby lake
• 22 Sep: 1.2hr - night flying, some stop-n-go landings
• 23 Sep: 0.4hr - introductory lesson in helicopter - Robinson R22
• 24 Sep: 0.9hr - hoovering lesson in helicopter :-)
• 24 Sep: 2.0hr - flight to Stone mountain, and few touch-n-goes at KGVL. Loooong wait before taking off at KPDK :-(