It (was Friday when I started writing this) and I’ve only flown twice this week. Weather, weather, weather.
Monday, it was raining. Tuesday, I called D. to find out if I was in the schedule. The clouds were really low, but it was still VFR. He said I was scheduled to fly at 4pm. A few minutes later, my phone rang again. “Can you come fly now?”
“Well, it’ll take me 15 minutes to get ready and half an hour to bicycle over there…”
“I’ll pick you up.”
So he did. It turns out that one of of the instructors had dropped a plane off at the nearby airport (Wiley Post) for radio maintenance and someone needed to pick him up. Rather than simply send D. out alone to get him, they figured a student might as well get some dual time in.
I had already roughly checked the weather but hadn’t gotten a brief. I certainly hadn’t plotted a course. I told D., but since I wasn’t PIC, I wasn’t really worried about it. The ceilings were at 2500AGL, so I knew we’d be flying pretty low whole way.
After takeoff, we turned northbound, and I called up OKC approach. We decided we’d plan on actually flying below the Class C airspace, which was more or less necessary for clouds. While we didn’t HAVE to contact OKC Approach, it makes sense to do so. I’m always a bit apprehensive talking to OKC approach because the frequency is always so busy, and there’s like… real traffic and stuff. Something like 85% of the traffic at OUN is student ops, so when I screw up, the controllers are expecting it. My calls to OKC are between calls from people like Southwest and Comair. I stumbled a bit but eventually managed to get it out that I wanted flight following to Wiley Post. The gave me a squawk code which I completely failed to catch and which D. dialed in wrong. After we got that straightened out, they complained that our transponder wasn’t giving off any altitude data. After cycling the switch between ON and ALT they got our altitude and told us to stay below 2500, and turn over downtown headed for Wiley Post. Wiley Post is just north of OKC, so I pretty much got to fly right to OKC, which was neat. I’ll be doing lots of instrument work there, when I start my instrument training. (But, by the time I start instrument, hopefully the ILS will be completed at OUN)
I did my best navigating by pilotage. Wiley Post is kinda hard to miss though.
When OKC handed us off to Wiley Post tower we were flying west, and were just the southeast of runway 35. The controller told us to report on a downwind for runway 17.
D. acknowledged tower then started complaining to me. “What? That’s ridiculous! Why won’t he let us approach from this side? There’s no traffic!” I was confused and trying to figure out where a downwind for 17 was. So we needed enter a downwind for runway 17… Which meant we needed to fly to the west side of the runway, fly out, then turn back in to enter on the 45 for a downwind, then make two righthand turns to land on 17. I confirmed this with D., who agreed. So we kept flying, perpendicular and toward runway 35, about to cross on the approach end of 35. As we were about to cross runway 35 the controller asked, “Uhh… Cessna Niner Zero One, have you got the field in site?” Uh-oh. This was clearly a nice way of saying “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” About then it hit me. All runways, unless otherwise posted, are lefthand patterns. OUN is righthand pattern, and unfortunately I’ve flown almost NOTHING but righthand patterns. That’s just the way that I think about it. D., on the other hand, was confused in an entirely DIFFERENT manner, as he demonstrated in his next radio call while I banged my head on the dashboard out of embarrassment for the both of us… “901 is just crossing the threshold of runway one seven, we’re going to enter on the downwind.” Ho boy. Tower snapped back, “You’re crossing the threshold of runway THREE FIVE, that’s runway THREE FIVE.” I was already turning at this point and it took another second or two for D. to realize his mistake. The fact that my mistake was entirely different was the weird thing. We got in okay, albeit rather embarrassed.
I’ve got much, much more to write about. But I’m taking the private written test tomorrow afternoon, so I need to study a little bit and sleep.