Today there was some bad weather down at New Orleans moving north, so we stayed close to the airport and just worked on improving my landings. We practiced short-field and soft-field and combination short/soft-field landings, and I definitely felt myself getting more comfortable with them. One maneuver which gave me trouble was the soft-field touch-and-go.

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Today N5356F was back from its 100-hour inspection, and the weather was decent, so I finally managed to go on my long cross-country flight. I flew to Baton Rouge, then on to Lafayette, and then direct back to Hammond. The whole flight was actually quite unremarkable. No airliners chased me down, I didn't get lost — nothing worth recounting happened at all, really. Which I guess is a good thing.

Just about the only mistake I did make was due to the fact that I seldom fly N5356F. Most of my training has been in the other Warrior, N1288H. And so, out of force of habit, when I filed my flight plan and made my initial call to Baton Rouge Approach, I reported that I was flying N1288H. It was only about 20 minutes into the flight, when I requested Flight Following from Baton Rouge Approach, that I realized I had given them the wrong callsign, and had to correct it. But it was no big deal, and after that everything went smashingly. Now I'm up to about 32 hours. That 40-hour mark is getting pretty close.

My aviation headset arrived today, just as I was about to head to Hammond for a solo flight. This headset, unlike the basic units the FBO provides with their planes, has active noise cancellation, which is a feature I've never had before in a set of headphones. I tried it out in my apartmente before leaving, and it's incredible. A flick of the button, and my annoyingly loud air conditioning unit just disappears. Needless to say, it works great for a droning airplane engine as well (yet retains enough of the sound for you to clearly hear what the engine is doing). I could actually hear the wind whooshing past the plane.

This headset also has an input for a cell phone or MP3 player (automatically muted when anyone talks on the radio, of course). I don't know if there's anything more wonderful than lifting off the ground with Sigur Rós playing gently in the background as the sun starts to set.

Today Mike and I flew down over the lake to the New Orleans airport, MSY (or Moisant Field, as apparently every other pilot knows it — apparently the name was changed in 2001 and most people still use the old one), to give me a taste of flying into a Class B airport (the busiest classification). I had the option of flying to Baton Rouge instead, but I wanted to try flying into an airport that I had actually arrived at as a commercial passenger. It went surprisingly well. And when I checked my logbook later, it turned out this was my 50th landing. Hey, look at that.

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Today I set off with Mike on my first cross-country flight. We flew from Hammond to Gulfport, Mississippi, and then back again. Of course, it didn't start there. There's actually a lot more involved in planning a flight than I would have thought.

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