I was supposed to get my new temporary FAA airman certification when I passed my checkride, but I didn’t. Instead, I was told it would be FedEx’ed to me. it wasn’t by the time we left for New York, and when we got back last night, it still wasn’t. I had a copy of it that had been faxed to the company, then e-mailed to me, but it was a very low resolution and would not pass for an original. I called the chief pilot this morning to find out if I could fly with it. He didn’t know, and…
This is the third sunny day out of the 10 I’ve been here so far. It doesn’t rain that much up here; I don’t know why people think it does! My last couple of lessons in the simulator went pretty well. Lesson 6 was a sign-off for single-engine procedures. I forgot the occasional dumb thing, but my flying was solid and on track for Lesson 6. Lesson 7 is the sign-off for special airports. We go to four airports in the Dash 8 that are special enough that the captain has to go there with a check airman and get…
Last night (this morning?) went pretty well. Having a competent non-flying pilot made a world of difference. It was the sign-off lesson for non-precision approaches, and I didn’t make any mistakes that were too bad. I got behind the airplane at one point. I’d decided to descend, configure the airplane for landing, and execute a tear-drop course reversal for the VOR/DME approach all at once. It turns out that while that might not have been too difficult in the jet, it’s way too much for me to take on at once in Dash. Especially since the instructor had failed the…
Overall, it went okay. Our instructor was unable to get on the earlier flight from Phoenix, so he didn’t get to the sim until about 2345. That still gave us an hour to brief. My sim partner and I went to the sim location early, in hopes of finding a procedures trainer where we could practice callouts beforehand. Partner had clearly not done much effective studying, so it ended up being a couple hours of me teaching him. I elected to fly first. Normally, the person who flies second has an advantage, because you get to learn from the mistakes…
So, Jonah and I stayed up until 2am last night. My plan was that I would be tired this afternoon, so I could sleep when I got to Vancouver, and then be awake for me 12:45am-4:45am sim session. I woke up around 7am this morning, far earlier than I needed or wanted to. Jonah drove me to Denver and I got to my flight as they were boarding. My boarding pass made the machine beep loudly, which turned out to be a good thing. It meant that I’d been upgraded to 1st class. This was a vast improvement over the…