Well, the sim session tonight (Lesson 6) was far from perfect, but I think I’m getting there. The instructor said he didn’t see anything that would likely result in a checkride failure, but we didn’t do stalls today, which are still the thing I suck most at. The sim malfunctioned and kept kicking off the autopilot at the end of my session, so I had to fly the VOR/DME to 22L without an autopilot. What’s funny is I’ve said to several people that this was the thing I really, really, didn’t ever want to have to do, and fortunately it’s…
So, Rob’s been struggling with rudder control on the runway. This is a strange thing to have trouble with, given that he can fly fine otherwise, our instructor thinks the problem is likely the simulator. I don’t think that staying on centerline is at all easy, but I’m able to do it. The sim instructor flew the sim a bit today, and has declared that it’s “not right,” so we didn’t fly, in hopes that the loss of income will convince FlightSafety to fix it. I’m less bothered by the rudder control, and a lot more bothered by loose pitch…
I’ve got today off. I woke up this “morning” at about noon when housekeeping tried to get in my room. Seems I forgot the Do Not Disturb sign last night. They quickly gave up and I went back to sleep until about 3pm. I’ve been having really weird dreams, I’m not sure if it’s a result of the sleep schedule or the mind blender that is the simulator, or some combination of both. It seems there was another earthquake last night at about 12:40am, but I’m sure I would have just attributed it to turbulence in the simulator if I…
[Editor’s note: The following was written at 4am, and with the intent of getting it down, rather than being terribly high quality writing. I’ll try to clean it up later. I also appreciate that much of it is probably incomprehensible to most of you as it’s highly technical, but I figure it’d give you a feel for what’s going on. It probably makes for an interesting comparison to my stories about learning to fly in the first place.] I just got to play a $50 million computer game. We spent the first 1.5 hours just learning how to set the…
This could be bad. I figure they’re probably still enough in need of pilots that it’s not the end of the world, but it very well could keep me from moving upward as fast as I’d like. Also, my sim date has been moved, it’s now April 16 in St. Louis. Theoretically. I’m headed back home from New York tomorrow morning.