You know, I don’t have much to say about today’s cross country flight.
I didn’t do anything horrific.
I kept my sectional chart from taking over the cockpit and eating the occupants alive. I managed to hit a good share of my checkpoints (due to picking better checkpoints than, say, “large rock behind the hay bale near the yield sign”).
Tip: Towns are easy to see from the air.
The morning started out at 5 a.m., which was completely unnecessary except for the fact that the house I’m temporarily living in seems infested with crickets, and the neighborhood had a rash of garage sales that led to overzealous old women wanting a first peak and chance to buy dusty crap for 25 cents.
I got up, grumped a bit, and set out marking the sectional with the plotter, filling in the nav logs up to the point of weather. I figured I’d wait a few hours before getting the weather, so I went back to bed in time to hear some moron a block away repeatedly glorying in his truck’s glass pack mufflers.
@#%!@*@!
I woke up, tried to get the weather on the, uh, “borrowed” wifi connection from the school across the street. I wish I could complain about the non-signal, but since it’s “free” I just can’t. So, I drove to Bismarck Aero where I figured I could make use of the internet and find a table to finish the rest of the nav logs in the few hours before we were to fly.
I arrived to find the facility crowded with Civil Air Patrol members in the middle of some kind of practice. I didn’t find this comforting, especially when my instructor cheerfully said later that they were the people who would “look for us if we go down.”
Um…
I got the weather, and then went back to the Noisiest Neighborhood In The World With Crickets to finish the nav logs. I wasn’t quite finished when the time rolled around to get back to meet with my instructor and get going on the flight. In the middle of traffic, he called my cell phone.
“Just so you know, there are a lot of people here. I’m in a back office,” he said.
I’ve informed him many times that lots of people make me nervous.
In the end, I finished the nav logs, my instructor looked at the figures and deemed them correct, and we were soon airborne.
My landings were OK, though I really wanted to pull off a few stellar efforts to show my regular instructor, Mark, that I could do it. He hasn’t really been privy to the more decent ones that led to Bob having me solo. Today wasn’t the day for a Julie parade, though. I had one that, as my instructor said, probably should have just been a go-around.
“The only landing I didn’t really like was the last one at Jamestown. You ended up on the back side of the power curve,” he said as we talked about the finished flight. “When the nose is up and the power is dropping…”
Nose down. Add power.
We flew from Bismarck to Jamestown to Carrington and back to Bismarck. The flight from Carrington to Bismarck was a good lesson in weather. We eventually canceled the flight plan and deviated from the route to avoid thundershowers.
I could make up all kinds of exciting stories, but mainly, we saw a little rainbow.
That’s nice.
Here are my nav logs:
UPDATE: I made a chart to help me when I call to file a flight plan. (I get nervous talking to people. This is silly, I know.) It’s fairly basic, but I think it’ll help me a bit. Click here to get the flight plan chart (PDF).
Addendum: I asked my instructor if he’d seen my “simplified” nav log. “It helps you get from point A to point B.”
“No.”
Pity.
