Finally! It seems to have taken slightly longer than forever. I’ve got nearly 60 hours; it should have taken more like 40. The national average is more like 80, but those are people who fly once a week or once a month. The scary thing is just how little I actually know and how little experience I have. Sure, I can fly, but I can only imagine how much trouble I could get in were I rich enough to have my own plane and decide to go fly across the country. Before I started I thought I would know more…
There’s nothing like failing a checkride to make you feel crappy. I showed up at 9am with everything I was supposed to have for my oral exam. After two and half hours of endless questioning, the check airman told me to go ahead and preflight the airplane. I actually did really well on the oral exam– I missed maybe three questions in two and a half hours. He gave me a list of things I needed to review. For most people it’s a fairly lengthy list. Mine had two items on it, “Convective Sigmets and Airmets.” And it’s not like…
I didn’t fly last week after Monday. We went to Chicago. (There are more tales from Chicago, but I think Joanna should tell about them, because people will think I’m making fun of her if I point out the silly ways in which she tried to keep us from coming home.) We came back from Chicago. On Monday, I couldn’t get Mike on the phone. I drove to the flight school, but there weren’t very many people there. I thought maybe the school was closed. On Tuesday, Mike asked if I’d heard from Will about my recheck. I hadn’t. He…
First a note about names… I’ve decided not to post first and last names of instructors, so they can’t Google their names and get upset about something I did or didn’t say. So now there exist abbreviations. My instructor from the beginning has been Mike D., and I’ve generally referred to him by his last name. Since his first name is Mike and that’s generic enough, I’ll just call him Mike now. I was awakened early Thursday morning by my telephone. B. wanted to know if I could fly at 2pm on Thursday instead of 8am Friday. Okay. “But it…
Last week D. signed me off for my “stage check”. Since I’m learning to fly under FAR Part 141 (the part that deals with specialty pilot schools), my training is a little different than most people who learn under Part 61. Part 141 supposedly follows a rigid syllabus which is prepared by the flight school and approved by the FAA. 141 Private training is divided into three “stages”, at the end of each I have a “stage check”. I already did my first one, where all I have to do is prove that I can fly the plane, do some…