First Flight

Took my first passengers up Sunday. The day was kind of hazy, but otherwise decent for flying.  My very first passenger was my grandma and we were up for about an hour and then I took my grandpa up for about half an hour. So, that was pretty exciting. I’d make this post more interesting, but I just wanted to post some pictures so you could see my awesome First Flight gracias a Wilbur and Orville. Oh, and my pumpkin from Halloween. There’s also a picture of Katie (another student) and me during my birthday just because.

Can I get a… woot woot?

Okay… Big News…

I PASSED MY CHECKRIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, unbeknownst to all of you, I had my checkride today, the one nice day out of the entire month. My examiner arrived at the airport at 9am, so I of course woke up at 6:45 out of sheer panic that I was going to fail miserably and crash into the airport  killing everybody in a fiery blaze.

I didn’t obviously, but that sheer panic kept me from falling back asleep after only 4.5 hrs of sleep last night. I got to the airport a bit after 7am and called the weather station to see if my flight was doable.  Based on some weird cosmic coincidence, I ended up getting this flight briefer that I had before. He’s kind of a strange guy. I feel like if I met him in person, he’d be the kind of guy who would invade your personal bubble, talk too loudly and touch you too much on the arm. Anyway, after chatting with him for a while I got my information and finished planning my cross-country trip that I wasn’t really going to take and then I asked Dick (the airport manager) all the small questions I had remembered over the course of the night that I wanted to ask.  The examiner finally arrived and we sailed forth into the oral portion of the exam.

I’ve talked about this in an earlier post, but basically he sat me down and asked me questions about regulations, laws, charts, medical issues in flight (like carbon monoxide poisioning or vertigo, etc.) and emergency procedure and so on and so forth. He was all really friendly and chatty so at least half of the 1.5 hours was spent talking to him about weird plane related things. He was also really helpful if I didn’t know something. I figure if you admit you don’t know something and show enthusiasm for learning it, it has to count for something, right?

So when he told me to go get the plane ready, it was pretty exciting. The oral was really the part I was most worried about because I wasn’t sure what to expect, I knew what to expect on the flying part because it’s practical knowledge and Courtney and I had been practicing it for the last 2 months. So after I did my pre-flight (which is making sure the plane is ready for action) we got in and after an embarassing moment of forgetting to turn up the volume on my radio and trying to taxi onto a runway that had somebody flying onto it because I didn’t hear them (but of course Super Pilot that I am, I totally caught it) we took off normally. We followed my first two checkpoints and after my second one, I had to fly to a side airport. I located the airport and then we went to an area without people or cities, and did maneuvers. I ended up doing 2 stalls, slow flight, some hood work (with foggles), a fabulous steep turn and a pretty awesome turn around a point (if I do say so myself) and then he told me to land at the airport below us. That was when I realized that we were already back at my very own Small Town Airport! I could see my car in the parking lot! That was pretty much one of the most exciting moments of my life, knowing all I had to do was land a couple of times and I’d pass. And I can land planes pretty darn well most of the time. So I did a normal landing, an emergency landing, and a short-field landing + a soft-field takeoff and short-field take off and then the blessed words of “If you can taxi back to the airport without hitting anything or running anybody over, you get your license” were heard.

Yeah, it was a glorious moment.

There are even pictures of me smiling a lot, I’ll post them when they get emailed.

After that, we hung around while Randy finished and got his license too (!!!!!)– He’s the guy I’ve been training with the last 2 weeks or so who was preparing for his license as well with Courtney. And Mike, another of Courtney’s students, soloed today. So overall, it was a pretty huge day. It involved cake and icecream in the end so you know it was big. Post-work, we all went out and due to a previous bargain I had to buy Courtney a pitcher of beer and then I headed home and am now overjoyed to be sitting on the couch without having to study or think about flying for at least 24 hours. I’m so exhausted, but oh so happy.

Living at the Airport

As my checkride draws closer (like a driver’s test on steroids) I find myself calling my adorable Small Town airport something resembling home. I have explored every crevice, corner, and drawer in the airport. I don’t hesitate to put my feet on the chairs or tables. I use the radio to tell people what runway to land on and I answer phones. I consider skipping out on paying for candy bars because I’ve already given them thousands of dollars and I practically live there anyway and I use their computer to mapquest directions. And to top it all off, I know how to work the thermostat. If that isn’t living at a place then I don’t know what is.

My usual day involves me waking up too early (but thankfully post-daylight) and seeing how quickly I can get through my morning routine- this wouldn’t be an issue but I have this tendency to turn off my heat at night so the sprint from my bed to the heater in the morning is something like watching a flamingo fight an icestorm. Once the heater is on I snuggle back under my covers until the shivering stops and then I figure the room is probably warm enough to get undressed in. That of course takes away from the half hour I give myself from alarm clock to driving my car out of the snowy driveway.

In any case, once the whole driving thing begins, it’s approximately half an hour to the airport. I have this whole theory that no matter how fast or slow I drive, I will always get there in about 28 minutes. The theory goes on to suggest that I then therefore must have the ability to control time when in a car. It’s a special type of control, limited to averages. Once the trip has been made more than 3 times, I will always (past that three-time limit) arrive at my destination at the average time it took those 3 trips. The first three trips to the airport took somewhere between 26 and 30 minutes. The average was 28 minutes and that is almost exactly how long it has taken me since then regardless of speed or road conditions. The same happened in Oregon during my frequent trips between school and my parents homes- it always took 2 hours and 45 minutes. Anyway, it’s a limited skill, just like my reknown ability to be a food psychic.

This actually dates back to my early years in college where I was forced to eat food made by other people I didn’t know. The skill came into play when my dormmates and I would eventually get hungry enough to eat this food and would head over to the cafeteria- on the way I would guess what they would be serving. Obviously, because it’s a skill, I was always right. Like I said, it’s a limited talent. I  mean, who really cares if I  know that inside the building they’re serving quiche and asparagus- nobody. But, it’s all I have, so don’t knock it.

Um… anyway, after I get to the airport I listen to Courtney tell me that I should know things I don’t (or can’t think of an answer to fast enough) and then we take the airplane up up and away. We have recently been spending only an hour in the plane, because “if you don’t know it by now, I can’t teach it to you with any more time in the plane” so we go through everything that will be on the test. Which of course I’m going to list for your viewing pleasure:

The instructor gives you a cross country to plan in advance, in my case it will be South Bend, Indiana. South Bend is about 160 miles away from me. We don’t actually fly to South Bend on the test, but you do have to prove that you can plan cross-countries since that’s what you do as a pilot. You fly around, and assumedly fly to other places. Cross country by definition is actually just any place other than your airport no matter how close, but most people only do flight planning for places that are actually not-next-door. In any case, you do all the planning for it that I mentioned in an earlier post- checkpoints, fuel consumption, weight and balance, time en-route, etc. and on your flight test, you fly to the first couple of checkpoints to prove you can. After that, the instructor takes you to an area to work on maneuvers and emergency procedures and stalls.

The Maneuvers: There are several, obviously, since it’s plural. The most difficult is apparently an S-Turn. The S-Turn does shows the instructor that you can do… something. Like make S’s over a road. My grandpa says that S-Turns are used to teach a student precision and how to work with winds. An S-Turn begins when your butt is over a road running perpendicular to the plane. As your butt passes the road (yes, this is an actual way of telling when you should turn) you begin your bank to the left until you get about 1/2 a mile out from the road and then begin your turn back towards it. When you’re over the road, you should level the wings, and you should be facing the opposite direction of the heading you started out from. Then you turn to the right and do the same thing. The wind is obviously taken into consideration because it will push you either away or towards the road, so you have to shallow your bank into the wind and steepen your bank on the downwind side.

Turns Around a Point: You know what, that’s self-explanatory, you make a 720 degree turn around a point. I don’t know why you have to circle it twice, but you do. If you can’t figure out what a “turn around a point” is, you fail.

Steep Turns: Also self-explanatory. The hard thing for me on steep turns is keep my altitude. You have to make a 45 degree bank and turn 360 degrees one way and then usually 360 the other way. But the problem is, you have to maintain your altitude, sometimes pulling on that yolk is like pulling out glued-in dentures.

Stalls: Well, stalls are when you pull back hard enough on the yolk to make the airplane stop working. It’s not like you fall from the sky or anything, but it trains you to fix the problem in case it should occur. Stalls are most likely to occur when climbing or descending from the runway, like if you’re trying too hard to get over an obstacle at the end of the runway (some trees for example) or are trying to compensate for being too high/low on final and are holding the yolk back, etc. In any case, if it happens you have to know how to fix it, so they make you do it on the flight test. There are two different types, Take-off and Landing, but they’re fairly similar so I won’t go into details. Basically you bring the nose down so you don’t keep stalling or spin the plane. Logical, I know.

So after you do all that (and surely things I’m missing) the examiner will also make you emergency land, or almost emergency land. They cut the power and you simulate a landing in a field. You only get a few hundred feet above the earth, it’s not like they actually make you brave the cows and corn down below. Courtney actually takes you low enough to buzz the cows, but that’s an entirely different story.

Then they pretend you’re lost and you have to take them back to the main airport (in my case I no doubt will have no idea where I am so it’s not actually pretending) You use this thing in the plane called a VOR that tunes into a VOR nearby. It’s basically a device that sits on a field and sends out signals so that if you’re in range, you can pick it up, and the VOR in the plane will tell you which direction the VOR is. You find two different VORs, find out where you are from them and draw lines on the chart that will cross, thus identifying your position. It’s like a pirate map and X marks the spot. Then you know where you are in relation to the airport you’re looking for. There’s also a LORAN and if all else fails, you can call the nearest radar approach frequency and have them give you directions back to your airport.

The final bit I assume will be take-offs and landings, to make sure you can land on grass or on short-fields or in crosswinds. I’m hoping its a windless day so that I don’t have to do crosswind landings, they’re a lot of work. Once that is over, and assuming I didn’t lose altitude (+/- 100 feet) and didn’t lose myself and didn’t land on the wrong runway or kill us, I pass the test. Oh, that’s assuming I pass the oral of course, so back to studying. Entonces, wish me luck!

THE WRITTEN

So, you all can rest easy, I got my scores back on my test and I got… wait for it…

NINETY EIGHT PERCENT!!!!

Yeah, I am just as excited as those exclamation points want you to think I am.

I will illustrate the scene for you so you can be just as excited as I was during the momentous event. In order to take my test I had to drive about an hour/hour and a half to get to the testing center. It’s at one of the major-ish airports in the area and so at 11:30 this morning complete with my trusty flowered underwear, plotter, calculator, flight computer, compass rose, #2 pencil and mapquest directions I set off into the great unkwnown. By unknown I mean the major interstate, but it could have turned out badly. I did think Alaska was below us for 14 years so God only knows what I’m capable of. So I tuned into my local “All Christmas Music All the Time” station to keep myself in an upbeat mood and drove on down.

I realized about half an hour into the drive that I still didn’t know the answer to something I thought of that morning, so unable to research while driving (well, able, but not suggested) I called my “lifeline” — aka, my phone-a-friend, Mom. I asked her nicely to google something for me, because I just knew in my heart of hearts that if I didn’t know the answer to that question I would get asked it on the test.

In any case, I arrived in plenty of time and spent the extra half hour I had reading through my test booklet to double check the questions I wasn’t sure about.

So, I finally get inside and there are two other guys waiting to take the test too. The proctor sets us up in this room that has 3 computers, each divided by a little plywood thing.  He sets mine up first, but somehow we ended up with the Recreational Pilot Test on the screen instead of the Private Pilot. Apparently, this isn’t as easy to fix as one might think and it required calling Tech Support and the “Center” and having them work him through it and give me a new ID code. Well, finally he got all three of us situated, went through directions, gave us the test material (like charts, graphs, transparency, and scrap paper) and pushed us out of our nests.

So I take the test, and I finish it and then I go get the proctor to let him know I’ve finished and he comes in to print off my results and tell me if I passed (I have to say now, I totally thought I’d passed, but I wasn’t sure what grade I got) so the first screen that comes up says “Yay! You passed!” — okay, it doesn’t say that, because the FAA is a little too uptight to use the word  Yay on anything, but it was the gist of it. And I was glad. Then he printed off my results (which gives you your score) and he picked it up and remarked on it and gave me a weird look and then showed me the paper where I promptly did a little fist in the air thing and danced around in circles and smiled like it was Christmas morning. The proctor guy even said that it was the highest score he’d seen in ages… so I’m like a prodigy of something. Not to get ahead of myself because I still have to study for my oral and checkride but it was a pretty thrilling moment. He left me alone in the lobby while he printed off the other test for one of the guys in there with me and I danced around in circles until he came back in the room.

In celebration we’re having ribs and mac and cheese for dinner. I also called everybody I know to let them hear the good news. My grandparents too seemed pretty pleased. So I officially passed the written, I bet Courtney will be pleased.

College Knowledge

So we had snow today. No, seriously… snow. Like the white stuff that sticks to the ground that Southern Oregonians think is a tale told by parents to keep their children awake at night. I’m not talking snow-shoe needing snow, but ya know… a very light dusting. The point is, it was snow. Which means winter is officially just around the corner. And frankly, I can’t afford to have winter knocking at the door unless I can simutaneously install a home security system to keep it out when it realizes we’re all inside next to the fire laughing that it can’t get in. I also asked nicely for my birthday to have decent weather until I got my license, and I’m a good person usually so I feel like God having to possibly interfere with Mother Nature isn’t too much to ask. I’m sure Mother Nature owes God one, Jesus died for her sins too.

The secret: That said, I’m scheduled to take the written test on Tuesday. It means I’ve been taking about 70+ billion practice tests and I tend to score somewhere between 83% and 96% depending on the test. You only need 70% to pass, so hopefully that won’t be an issue. The written test is basically just an excuse to get you started early on studying for your oral. It has similar information on it, but it exercises your powers of rote memorization. On 90% of the questions, I can offically just look at the answers offered (3 choices) and know which one is the answer without looking at the question because I have answered that question 16,000 times. It does not mean I know it if somebody asks me it, but it does mean that if somebody gave me choices or put the question in front of me, I could pick out the answer.

My grandpa got 100% on his last written test for flying, and my great Uncle got 97% so frankly, I have some big shoes to fill. The good news is, I’m declaring right here that the chance of me getting above 97% is pretty slim since the highest I’ve gotten on a practice exam is 96% — I’m blindly shooting for 100% but will not be disappointed and will be expecting anything in the 80s. Now listen: this is the secret of how I lived my college life and I graduated on the Dean’s List, so apparently it worked out for me. This doesn’t mean you should be following it, but it does come highly recommended. Not only does this create less stress for you, the test-taker, but it also means that anything above 90% is like winning the lottery. It will be the best moment of your day if you pass it beyond your expectations. This makes you less like those people who refuse to leave their apartment because they need to be “studying” for that Monday final on Friday night when you and all their friends that they haven’t seen in 3 weeks go out to celebrate their promotion at work and then they call you at 3am sobbing because they just can’t understand why they have to be like that and why they can never just allow themselves to have fun or receive an A- on a test,  I guarantee you, nobody cares if you get an A- but you. And meanwhile moron, you missed your promotion party to study England’s affinity for Africa during the 1800s because yeah, that was definitely important to know for your Human Physiology major.

Keep your expectations low while aiming high. It is the holy grail of college knowledge.

Back in the Saddle Again… eating chili?

So. Thankfully for everybody involved, the weather cleared (we had 6 days of yuck) and I was able to start flying again. Courtney says I’m down to about two weeks left, and with any luck I will be able to take my test (and pass is where the luck comes in).

Yesterday however, was the 10th annual Chili Cookoff at the airport. My grandpa and I flew there because it’s infinitely cooler than driving. It’s always nice to be a passenger in a plane, then you get to look out the window and not worry about anything going wrong- because the plane is officially only your problem if something goes horribly awry and you’re called to action.

The funny thing about events having to do with the airport/airport family is that when you’re invited by Courtney to attend, it’s not a real invitation, it’s like a statement that you’re coming. He doesn’t so much believe in asking, as telling, and then the way he says it makes it feel like it’s part of your lesson. Like if you’re not going to the *insert event here* then you’re missing out on some valuable quality Courtney-telling-you-important-things time. In any case, at the chili cookoff, apparently a bunch of people cook chili and everybody just shows up and eats them. Go figure. They’re numbered (the chili pots), so at the end you write down the number of the chili you liked best. The winner gets this traveling trophy and a door prize (door prizes go to second and third place as well). As a side note, the G on my keyboard just fell off… I mean, I put it back on, but it makes you wonder why it was going all kamikaze on me. I like the G, maybe not as much as I like some of the vowels or the S or T… but you know, I’ m fond of the G as well. It’s like a third cousin I don’t get to see super often, but I still enjoy being around.

Anyway, so everybody showed up to the chili cookoff. All the usual suspects plus my grandparents, great grandma and uncle. Chili 4 won, which I think is funny because it was the one that tasted most like how you think a chili should taste, probably proving that people have no imagination or acceptation of uniqueness. Though I think we covered that idea when Lord of the Flies first arrived on the scene.

Today however, there was no chili involved. We basically just did 6,000 takeoffs and landings. Okay, maybe not 6,000 — but at least 12 and that may not seem like a lot, but I promise you, an hour of taking off and landing is the equivalent of at least 4 hours of solid “real” work. And your hand cramps up because of the whole holding the yolk thing.

There’s not actually a whole lot more to say about flying right now. But don’t worry, when finals arrive I will have a thousand things to say so you guys will have something to look forward to.