KDAB INTL. AIRPORT

From the map, it looks scary. From above, a little more. That's the biggest airport I've ever took-off and landed! We are settled at Daytona Beach International Airport, and that's our home base. I flew 2 times this week, and I could tell that taxiing next to a Citation and waiting for a Jumbo to Land while you are "holding short of runway 7L", it's a pretty exciting experience. Suddenly you feel that you really are a pilot, and you are on a real big airport. KDAB is class C airspace, that would be something not as a big as "Antonio Carlos Jobim intl. airport" or "JFK intl. airport", but quite as big and busy. Most of the airports in Israel (LLHA, LLET, LLSD) I would say are like the "Class D" airports here.

We fly here for the instrument course the C172-SP, very powerful (180HP) and new with a GPS and leather seats, compared to my old C152 flown during my PPL it's quite an upgrade :)
We landed at Flagler (KXFL), an uncontrolled airport; I was expecting to land on something like Jacarepagua (SBJR) or Meggido (LLMG), but it had 4 runways and even 1 waterway!! On the take off back to KDAB, were waiting behind me a KingAir B200 and a little twin Jet, not sure what... I'll take my camera next flight!

Today I met the FRASCA-141, a simulator that totally sucks, exactly in these words. Well, they are supposed to be good for instrument training but it's so frustrating to fly it after you fly a real plane... My Flight Simulator on my laptop has better graphics, and the controls are so sensible, it was so hard just to maintain a level flight. I found myself almost kicking the panel after 20 minutes struggling with it, but my instructor hit the "pause button" on the simulation and tried to make me calm down... I have to get used to it cause we fly 14 hours on that crap. Ahhh bad day!


Tomorrow is thanksgiving day, a big holiday in America, not sure what they celebrate. What I do know is that no one works anywhere and there is plenty of food specially turkeys. We don't have class tomorrow so we have some time at least to study to the stage I ground school test, this Saturday.
Have a good week everyone!