I can think of perhaps twenty reasons why I haven’t been flying, but above all else it’s now purely a matter of money. I’m not hurting for cash, but I’m considering a pretty radical career change in the future. Without proper funding, I’ll never get that off the ground, no pun intended.
Maybe someday I’ll fly. Just not today.
Check out this link on Engadget and look for the approach template.
I haven’t forgotten about flying. Quite the contrary. But the world around me has been rapidly changing, both in and out of work. Some would suggest for the better, some for the worse. At the end of the day, change is the buzzword. And boy is it buzzing.
For the last couple months I’ve been fairly uncertain what my future of flying would be like. Actually, I’ve been worried about my future of employed life. My bank has been going through tremendous changes, and we’re still not even over the hump yet. But I’m happy to report that the future looks bright, I have a job, and I will indeed be able to pursue flying lessons.
Not tomorrow. Not next week. But it will happen.
So right now, while I’m waiting to get up in the air, I’ve decided to order the Sporty’s DVDs. They’re an investment I’m sure will pay off in the end, and at the very least I’ll be ironing out my book skills while waiting for my next chance to get back up in the air.
I’ll end with my favorite Japanese kotowaza (proverb) and an explanation of why it fits right now.
塵も積もれば山となる
chiri mo tsumoreba yama no naru
Literally it means ‘even specks of dust can gather to form a mountain’ but if you were to look for an English equivalent it would most likely be ‘great oaks from little acorns grow’. I prefer the dust reference because as I learn, every bit of new information comes together, taking me to a higher level. Patience is essential.
These days, I have plenty at hand.
Well. What an interesting month it’s been since I last posted on this blog. Instead of flying lessons in December, I chose to take a short vacation in November at Mammoth Cave for some caving. Not spelunking, caving. It was beautiful, relaxing, and if you want to read about it, check out my blog posts on the subject. If you are claustrophobic, I’ll warn you the second one might make you a bit uncomfortable. But it’s a good read, so please enjoy.
Learning to fly hasn’t dropped off my radar. It’s become my #2 project at the moment. I’d talk more about what I have in the works, but trust me, when I have something major to share, I’ll share it here. In the interim, I’m still debating which training videos to get. I love the idea of the online subscriptions to places like Sporty’s and King Schools, but in my world, DVD’s are meant to be ripped to my iPhone or my iTunes library (and thus my AppleTV). Yes, I live an Apple lifestyle, except I’m not dancing in silhouette against a monochromatic backdrop.
Knowing how much video I consume away from the television, or on demand at my own TV, I’m pretty certain the DVD’s are the way I’m going to go. A slight hint in the right direction might nudge Santa Clause into buying me a set of videos from Sporty’s. But we’ll see. I’d certainly love a gift certificate to them either way…
An interesting side note. While we were in the Mammoth Cave area, I spied a GA field called Glasgow Municipal. That’s incredibly exciting to me. At around 400 miles between Glasgow, KY and Chicago, IL, (give or take 50 miles depending on airport) that could seriously be a destination for me to fly into. Caving is one of the few sports I enjoy, and I’d love to fly there someday. The road trip is 6+ hours. I’m certain it could be done much faster in a GA plane. But that is a potential goal for the future…
So, slowly I’m studying, learning what I can online and in books, and making my way back to a cockpit in the near future. Thanks for staying tuned.
Here’s a quick video I whipped together from my first Fly-In with some of the myTransponder.com pilots. Todd from MyFlightBlog.com was the pilot on this trip from KPWK to KJVL. Enjoy!
Saturday morning my AOPA mentor Todd from MyFlightBlog.com picked me up and we headed to KPWK. There was a fly-in at KJVL in Janesville, WI that would be a gathering of some MyTransponder.com pilots. This would be the first time I flew with Todd, my first fly-in, my first visit to Janesville, my first flight with a purpose other than training exercises, and the first time I’d be meeting any of these folks.
That’s a lotta firsts if you ask me.
The preflight work was interesting. Todd has created some useful tools for flight planning and the information he had was organized and concise. It was my first experience with calling for a flight advisory. Watching him weave all the details together for the flight plan and then execute it taught me quite a few things.
There is a ton I need to learn about planning a flight. Just because you are flying direct from one airport to another doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use a plan. Todd had marked waypoints on the direct route and calculated the approximate ETA’s for each using the weather info and his E6B. Even though we had a Bendix GPS on board, navigating with the sectional chart and waypoints was easier for me to understand. I’d rather be able to look out the window and figure out where we were than to look at a screen. And not every plane has a GPS, so the pilotage practce was useful.
Speaking of the Bendix, the one onboard our plane had a traffic warning system. It’s a super nice feature until it begins to malfunction. Just after takeoff, the system began to scream “TRAFFIC” at us. Initially we thought it was yelling about the traffic below us on the taxi/runways. After another 1000 feet of climb it began to wail some more with no traffic in sight. Something was definitely wrong. The gizmo kept yelping “TRAFFIC”, and every time it did I’m sure we looked like two meercats, sitting up straight, scanning the horizon for anything that looked remotely like another plane. The warning would sound, the traffic would appear on the screen, then it would disappear seconds later.
Instead of the boy who cried wolf, we had a Bendix-who-cried-wolf.
Eventually we shut it off because there was obviously a problem. The sectional and flight plan were essential to navigate the short 40 minute flight as we made our way to KJVL. Todd radioed for landing clearance, landed smoothly, and called ground for taxi instructions “to the restaurant”. I got a big kick out of that. It seemed like an unusual thing to say, but hey, that’s KJVL and Kealey’s Kafe.
As we taxied over I saw something I didn’t expect; a giant parking lot filled with planes in front of Kealey’s. I hadn’t thought much about that. Logically you would need a big parking lot for planes if a lot of your customers fly to your restaurant. I’m not sure what I expected, but it made me smile. Just not something you see every day.
We shut down and headed in. Right away we met Robbie and his four year old son Joshua. I’ll admit here and now that I was jealous of Joshua. What an amazing way to grow up! Robbie’s family is full of pilots, and I’m sure by the time Joshua makes it into his teens he’ll have logged more hours than me…
Many other pilots began to show up, and as the coffee began to flow, everyone began to aviation. When you get a handful of pilots together they talk about flying, planes, air regulations, and anything else aviation related. It was magical to hear stories and discussions about things I barely understood, but since everyone knew I was a total n00b, occasionally they’d translate an acronym or two. It was a warm welcome into a world I still feel like I know very little about.
What surprised me most was their keen interest in podcasting aviation related information. Thankfully I could talk shop about that, but I didn’t realize there would be such an appetite for information about the process of it all. I guess since I’ve been eating and breathing podcasting for so long I tend to forget how little how-to information is out there.
In any case, the food, the excellent coffee, and the really engaging and fun conversations with a group of folks who have a passion for flying proved all the rumors true. Pilots really are a friendly folk. From a completely green student like me, to guys who’ve flown for many years, get a group of aviation buffs together and the good times will indeed roll. I look forward to interacting more with the people I met that day in the future, and I’m sure MyTransponder.com will help foster that.
But we still had to get back to KPWK.
After saying goodbye, we went to preflight the plane for our return when I noticed the shark fin antenna on the underside of the front had carbon on the leading edge. Cessna 172’s have their exhaust pipe pointing down off the nose slightly to the right. With the way prop wash would blow over the body of the plane, I sort of thought the exhaust would whip over the various antennas on the belly of the plane. Like any exhaust, it could potentially dirty whatever it was blowing on.
Sure enough, it wasn’t just the shark fin that was dirty. All the antennas underneath the plane were darkened, including, surprise surprise, the large oval Bendix antenna. It was coated in a thick layer of sooty goo that took a few minutes to clean off with a paper towel. Todd agreed when I suggested that might be the cause of our our Bendix-who-cried-wolf traffic warnings.
During our smooth return to KPWK, the Bendix only screamed at us a few times. In all cases it was legitimate. The sooty antenna really was the culprit, and going forward we both agreed that we’ll make sure those antennas are squeaky clean during preflight. However, only just now, I wonder why the exhaust was so sooty. Could it be a bad plug or two and unburnt fuel? Could it be oil getting into the combustion chamber? I wonder what caused that greasy build-up.
So I went up with CFI Forrest again this past Saturday. Great day for flying, and we covered slow flight and some maneuvers. I did the radio calls with only one mistake, and it wasn’t anything huge. I’m working on the podcast and will post it when it’s ready.
But I got to thinking as I was looking over the coursework.
Windy City Flyers has a pretty complete course schedule, and they build in the ground work for each lesson. It’s not a bad thing, but thus far, for these first two lessons, that’s three hours of CFI time and 1.3 hours of flying time. I know I can do the ground on my own.
I just had a great conversation with Ken over at Stick & Rudder and I liked the things he had to say. They are a not-for-profit club, staffed by guys who love to fly in their 50’s and who aren’t, at least according to Ken, looking to run off to the airlines. They rent 152’s at half the price of 172’s at WCF wet, and their annual membership fee of $500 is prorated at the moment. Forgetting the membership fee, lessons at S&R could cost me $100 less than WCF.
OK. I’ll admit. It sounds like I’m being extremely cheap. But after reading through a number of message boards around the internet, I think there are lots of potential pilots who share my concerns about the price of learning. It makes complete sense for one reason and one reason alone…
The cheaper the lessons, the more I can fly.
So I suppose the moral of this story so far is that I’m still, four months later, shopping for flight schools. Next up on my agenda is a first lesson at Stick & Rudder in a 152 before I schedule any more lessons at WCF.
This is the audio log of my first flight with Windy City Flyers and my first attempt at blending cockpit audio with my own commentary. Definitely this podcast is a work in progress, so let me know any comments you have about the show.
The flight was awesome, and my post making tracks in the sky shows you our flight path, thanks to the AGL3080.
This is a very very basic lesson. We covered ascents, descents, turns, climbing and descending turns, slow flight, some ground reference work and an entire lesson without the DG. Who knew?
