Sore Throat, But Flying

The season’s dryness has caused me a painful sore throat that’s caused me to lose my voice. And any time something is wrong with my head, my ears get a bit off. I’m extremely experienced with ear infections, so I can say with some authority that I haven’t developed one yet. If my condition is unchanged tomorrow morning, I will go flying. I have an early flight time since the afternoon was already booked.

Lesson #18

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005

Lesson Date: 17-Nov-2005
Topics: Patterns, Landings
Flight Time: 1.5 hours
Take-Aways: I needed to shake the rust off after three weeks without a lesson.

More landings. It’s been three weeks since I’ve last flown and I had a lot of rust to shake off. I flew one full-stop and five touch-and-go landings at Lansing. My pattern work was atrocious. By my last couple of laps around the pattern, it was getting better. My landings were pretty good, but Bill doesn’t care about the touch-downs if the pattern work was sloppy. On my final approaches, I would tweak my power setting and then watch my airspeed jump all over the place. I would adjust my pitch and realize that I was going to land short of the runway, so I’d adjust power, and then adjust pitch…

Overall, I was very upset with my performance. I had regressed a lot. I was feeling so defeated by the end that I was considering everything to be garbage. In my post-flight briefing, Bill told me that my last two laps around the pattern and landings were the best he’s seen from me. I was incredulous. He said that while I certainly started the lesson well behind where I left off before, I had exceeded my previous performance by the end of the lesson. He walked me through my performance throughout the lesson and justified his assertion about my improved performance in the last two laps. I was a believer by the end of his discussion.

Given my overall performance in the lesson, I wouldn’t solo me any time soon. In fact, I don’t even think its on the horizon. My next lesson is 01-Dec-2005.

Ground Lesson #4

I didn’t fly today. I could have, but didn’t. 9DS was back after receiving its new prop, so I chose to use it for the lesson. It was a little below freezing today in Chicago and there was some wind. The preflight in the cold was exactly what I expected it would be: not fun. I was thorough, though. We only had 7 or 8 gallons of fuel, so we would need to stop while at Lansing and gas up. Then we hopped into the cockpit and I tried to start the engine. The battery was low. The engine didn’t start right away. Then the battery was dead. Bill moaned and offered to run back and get the keys for 1ZM while I started pre-flighting it, but the prospect of being out in the wind for another 15 minutes and getting more fuel on my hands just did not appeal to me. I suggested that if I have more ground school to cover before I solo, we could do that instead.

So ground school it was. I know my VFR minimums pretty well. I know the requirements for entering the different types of airspace (including special use airspace) pretty well. I need to memorize the required equipment for VFR day flight (TOMB FAME FLOATS) and the dimensions of B, C, and D airspace (radii and height AGL). I know my NOTAMs, but didn’t know the FDC, distant, and local categorizations. I knew ADs and needed prompting on SBs. I needed instruction on the aircraft and pilot documents required because I did not know how long aircraft federal registration or airworthiness documents last.

I spoke with Bill about the number of lessons I’ve been spending on landings and that I’m already at about 26 hours. He was a little surprised at the 26 hours, but he said that as an instructor, he normally solo’s students “late”. Instead of throwing me up as soon as I’m able to not crash the plane, he does all of the pattern instruction and then solo’s his students. Bill says he’s just waiting for me to get smooth in my use of the controls throughout the pattern and through the landing. What is discouraging is that Bill said most of the work is on the other side of soloing, particularly with cross-countries. I piped up that the nice thing about cross countries is that most of the “new” material can be book-learned to make optimal use of time: navigation by VORs and NDBs, reading sectionals, reading weather reports, understanding weather systems, E6Bs, etc. Bill grunted in a mild agreement, but it made me think I might be missing something…

So, I’m now planning to get done in about 60 total hours instead of the 50 for which I was hoping.

Moving Blog to New Home

I am moving this blog to a different blog server. [UPDATE: I've moved the blog back to Blogger just for the convenience.] For those interested, I'm hosting it on my own site using WordPress.

Those who access this site through the syndication feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnotherStudentPilot will be unaffected by this move. If you are syndicating directly from blogspot.com, please use the Feed Burner URL. As I perform house cleaning and improve the blog, duplicate entries may appear in the feeds. I apologize in advance.

Never... Going... to... Solo...

AAAARGH! It's been two weeks since my last flight lesson. In the last month, I've only gotten to fly twice. I was scheduled for a flight today, but the winds this afternoon were ridiculously strong (as anyone who watched the Bears game knows). Here's what the METAR said for 2:25pm, local time, when I'd normally be leaving Lansing and returning to Midway.

KIGQ 131825Z AUTO 27028G41KT 10SM SCT044 11/02 A2997 RMK AO2

Yes, that does say winds at 28 knots (32 mph) and gusting to 41 knots (47 mph)!

I can't change mother nature, but I'm getting more than a little desperate to get past my solo. I started practicing landing patterns with my 10th lesson on September 11th. It's now November 13th and I'm still not solo'd. Grrrrr!

My next lesson is scheduled for Thursday.

Diamond Aircraft's New Web Site

Diamond Aircraft has finally updated their Web site. I can now I send people to the site for images of the plane I fly without feeling embarrassed by the amateurish graphics and layout.