Imposed limits

Today's flight was first restricted and then canceled due to limits imposed on the plane and us.

Weather
The easy one to explain is the cancellation -- the weather ultimately shut us down today, and also canceled the flight part of Husband's scheduled BFR. NOAA had very consistently been predicting 60% chance of rain from 10-2 today. This morning it was foggy. Not just foggy, but faw-awggy. But as with most fogs it cleared out by mid-morning. Husband was meeting Chuck at the airport at 11 to start the BFR, and he called on his way over to have me give one last check of the weather.

JGG's METARs actually showed VFR with clear skies (below 12000) and 10 sm vis. The skies were anything but clear today, but I don't know the difference visually between clouds at 5000' v. 15000' so that could have been correct. Across the river at AKQ, it was LIFR with overcast at 300'. PHF showed similar to JGG, and its TAF indicated clouds that would gradually descend and thicken between 11 and 6, becoming IFR later tonight.

As the morning went on, I was optimistically planning my afternoon lesson which would hopefully end with me being endorsed to land solo at AKQ and PHF (towered). Again I ran into the RTFP error in headings from JGG (grr), but gave another check of the weather at JGG, AKQ and PHF using ForeFlight. The latest JGG METAR, ~11:45 or so maybe, said IFR. From VFR to IFR in less than an hour. PHF was getting worse more quickly than the TAF predicted, too. I accepted at that time that the afternoon flight would most likely not happen, but finished up the nav log planning as though we'd go DR to each point.

So, the weather imposed its will upon the day's plans. Oh well.

Required Equipment
Huh. Losing that silly little ELT antenna yesterday kinda screwed us. FAR 91.207 says you gotta have an operable emergency locator transmitter. But subparagraph f3 says the plane can still be flown for training purposes within 50 nm of home base.

Ahhh.... At first when I read the FAR, I thought, "There go the x-c plans!" But indeed, that was too quick of a conclusion to draw. Yes, the JGG-->LVL-->PHF x-c I've been planning and reworking every day for different wind conditions would be out; LVL is 60-some miles away. But we could still do an x-c; I'd just have to get a little creative with it. So I took out the sectional and my plotter and made a big 50-nm circle around JGG. That includes EMV, ORF, RIC, W75, PTB, ... Quite a few airports, actually. So the next step was to see how I could cobble together a route to get a couple of 50+ nm legs. JGG-->W75-->FCI-->PHF would give me two legs over 50, plus PHF for the tower and W75 (Hummel) would be the shortest field I'd ever flown to. And we'd still be following the regs. Sweet!

(A replacement antenna was supposed to have come into JGG today for us. Hopefully it did and will be installed soon, because I asked and Chuck agreed that my developing nav skills are good enough to do a solo x-c!)