We got to do our Chicago skyline flight last night (on our anniversary, aww)!

[This is the part of the flight recap where I talk about the uncertainty of the flight happening or not] The previous night, I noticed we had a beach hazards statement (a warning about life threatening waves and currents at Lake Michigan) in effect until the end of the day today, and I wondered if our flight would happen – when we get a warning like that, it usually means it’s going to be quite windy. Steven watched the weather most of the day, and at the time of our flight it looked okay – the wind was coming almost straight down the runway, which is better than a crosswind (for takeoff and landing purposes) and we were able to go. Yay! [/end uncertainty portion of recap]

Our reservation was from 5-7 pm. We got to Skill (where Steven went to school/we rent the plane), picked up the flight binder (we flew ES this time), downloaded the flight briefing from ForeFlight, did preflight (Steven showed me how to do the exterior inspection of the plane), did runup, and took off at 5:47.

My job for this flight was to watch for traffic (that’s always the passenger’s job!), let Steven know when we were below certain shelves of the Class Bravo airspace, and to let him know when we got close to the TFR (temporary flight restriction) around Guaranteed Rate Field.

What is Class Bravo airspace? Airspace classes are categorized by the type of air traffic control (ATC). Class B (Bravo) is controlled airspace around the busiest airports, like ORD (Chicago), where we live. The airspace is designed in layers, that get wider as you go up. Imagine an upside down tiered wedding cake – the first layer goes all the way to the ground, and you can’t fly through that (without special permission, go ahead and bother ATC for that, ha). The next layer is wider, but doesn’t go to the ground, so you can go below that, and the next layer is even wider, and you can fly below that and next to the previous layer. So basically, we stayed low for the entire flight, but I let Steven know when we were entering certain shelves and the maximum height he could fly. And not to confuse things, but if we had kept going south we would have entered a special Class C airspace around Midway airport. But we didn’t go that far because of the TFR.

What’s a TFR? I’m glad you asked! It’s a temporary flight restriction. I’m gonna copy this one straight from Google AI, because it’s accurate – a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) is an area of airspace that is restricted to air travel for a limited time. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issues TFRs for safety or security reasons, and they are communicated to pilots through Notices to Air Missions (NOTAMs). When we did our flight briefing we saw there was an active TFR around Guaranteed Rate Field, where the Sox lose, and there was a future TFR around Wrigley, where the Cubs play, starting September 2. We turned around before we got to the active TFR.

I absolutely love maps and love helping with navigation.

Okay, phew, I kind of exhausted myself typing all that stuff. The flight was fun and uneventful. Not a lot of traffic – we saw two other planes around our elevation coming and going, and two circling around the city (and some jets way above us). The city was beautiful, as always!

When we got closer to our home airport (UGN) I entered it into the Garmin GNS 430 so we could get distance estimates. Steven listened to ATIS (automatic terminal information service) about 15 miles out to get the weather conditions, and called ATC 10 miles out and they told him to contact them again at 2 miles out for a right base for runway 5. I didn’t know what right base meant (other than it was the type of approach to the runway) and told Steven I needed him to explain that later (he did, over dinner at El Famous. I won’t subject you all to that, today, anyway).

And we had a nice landing on runway 5 (winds were 04008KTG15KT, meaning they were coming from 40° at 8 knots, gusting at 15). You want to takeoff and land into a headwind (because it increases the airflow over the wings, and allows the plane to achieve lift earlier and at lower speeds, and requires less runway when you land), and the runway numbers correlate to the compass bearing, so 5 is 50°, the closest you can get to the 40° winds. ANYWAY.

We did postflight. I did one of the tie downs and gave myself rope burn on my pinky. Note to self, remove fingers from rope before securing. Duh.

This was a lot of fun, especially to do on our anniversary! Val is visiting next week and we plan to do this tour with her (this was kind of our test flight for that!).

If you made it this far, congratulations! And thanks for reading all my flying mumbo jumbo. I’ll likely post about each flight until I get sick of it. You likely already ARE sick of it, so again, thanks if you made it this far.