I have time for things these days. I like having time. I don’t need to study just yet. Commercial ground school is simply a re-hash of private ground school. By that, I mean that my flight school puts the commercial students in the same ground school as the privates. It’s generally referred to simply as “Dale’s Ground School”. Anytime I ask about the setup, I get one of two answers. One is, “You forget it all in instrument training, anyway.” The other is, “At least the stories are good.” I enjoyed Dale’s ground school quite a bit more the first…
Well, I have an instrument rating. Yay! I didn’t finish it by the end of August, so the aforementioned happy dance won’t happen. But I’m still glad. The oral portion of the exam was only a little over an hour long. There’s an art to both the taking and administration of an oral exam. B, who administered my private oral was really good at it, whereas C, who did my instrument, is not so good. C asked some really, annoying questions, sometimes in fill-in-the-blank form. More than once I had to say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”…
I flew on Tuesday, as a review flight since I hadn’t been called for my checkride yet. I still haven’t been called, so I flew again today, just to keep me current. So now I sit around and wait some more.
Well, Zach signed me off for an instrument check ride today. I don’t feel ready, but he thinks I am. I was going to refuse, but if I fly tomorrow, then I probably can’t get a check ride in Before Tuesday, since the flight school is closing down for the weekend. This way, if I get a checkride on Thursday, I’ll see how it goes. If they don’t get to me by then, then I’ll review next week, and take the checkride then. I’ve been making some pretty darned smooth landings lately. This probably is directly related to the fact…
On Wednesday, I flew from Norman, to Chikasha to Tulsa to Ponca City and back. 5.1 hours of flight. After much ado and discussion about the weather (rain likely, no thunderstorms for the area,) we set off around 10:30am. One of the legs of the flight had to be between two airports more than 100NM from each other. Norman and Tulsa is something like 96NM. So we flew west to Chickasha first. Originally, I was going to fly an NDB (non-directional bearing) approach into Chickasha, but the ADF (Automatic Direction Finder, it’s what receives the signal broadcast by an NDB)…