Atlanta Sport Flight Practice Area Overview
The chart below is a sectional chart of the Atlanta area with some significant features highlighted. Our home airport is labelled in red and other airports are in blue. Beside the name of each airport is its identifier (the 3 capital letters in parentheses.) Airports in North America each have a unique 4-letter identifier which always begins with "K". For example, Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport's identifier is KATL. But because the first letter is always a "K" it is normally dropped so "KATL" becomes "ATL". The home field of Atlanta Sport Flight is Atlanta Fulton County Airport, or "FTY". You may click on each airport on the map for more information about it from the free web site www.airnav.com.
Now let's look more closely at the Practice Area used by Atlanta Sport Flight pilots. Notice that when you leave FTY you will fly to the northwest (on a heading of approximately 310 degrees.) The edge of the practice area is about 7 miles from Fulton County Airport so it only takes about 6 minutes to get there at our climb speed. If you look to your right on the way out, you will easily see Dobbins Air Reserve Base only 5 - 6 miles away.
In addition to FTY, there are two airports which are very convenient to us for practicing landings or refueling. They are Paulding County Regional Airport at the northwest corner of the area and Earl Small Field/Stockmar Airport at the southwest corner. Also notice the yellow areas around the practice area. They are the city of Dallas on the north side near PUJ, Douglasville on the south side, and Villa Rica to the southeast near Stockmar airport.
With some practice, you will be able to easily navigate to any of the airports on this chart using visual reference. The only two airports which we do not go to are Dobbins (a military airfield) and Hartsfield-Jackson (much too busy to accomodate small training aircraft.) After studying the position of the practice area relative to Atlanta and the other airports, click on the link below to get a more in-depth look at the practice area.
