The Saturday meeting in Carrington became almost secondary once I decided that I would fly there. I haven’t done a solo cross country flight since my checkride back in October 2008. And, I hadn’t flown in dad’s airplane by myself yet. Due to a seemingly jinxed spate of little mechanical issues with the plane over the past months, I’ve developed a lack of trust in it. All in all, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the flight, but felt like I should do it.

The morning of the flight, I spent my time checking the weather and getting my gear together. I didn’t use the navigation logs I’d used during my flight training, but the website FltPln.com. However, I still made waypoint notes as well as airport diagrams on those printouts.

Everything seemed in good shape and I had my sectional chart all marked with my route, waypoints, and even notations for when I should start my descent as well as when I had hit the 30-miles-out point to contact Bismarck approach on the way back.

Dad’s airplane, Chip, is very basic, for lack of more technical terminology. There’s no GPS or such. It doesn’t even have the standard six-pack of instruments. There’s a VOR, a single radio. The plane I learned in had GPS, so this was going to be a flight (albeit a short one) in which I wouldn’t have the fall-back pink line to guide me, but instead meant I would have to really use pilotage and my magnetic compass and consider the wind and (on the way back), the VOR.

As I was doing the pre-flight check, I was rehearsing the flight in my mind; what I’d say to tower, the heading I needed to find as soon as I was off the airport, what my first checkpoint was. I was trying to garner up some confidence. I like flying, but I don’t like flying alone. I feel very aware of being up thousands of feet in the air in an old airplane and have, maybe, read too many AOPA near-miss or never again stories to stop myself from thinking of everything that could go wrong instead of enjoying the flight.

Though the standard saying of “any landing you walk away from is a good landing” is one I’ve oft heard, and while it’s true I’m still very much here today, and walking, I have to say that the day was stressful and when I got home I went to bed. Crashing, from too much adrenaline and abject fear.

When the day was all done and I was talking with Mark about the minor but still scary mishaps, he kept being an annoying instructor about it all, trying to give me perspective by pointing out that I certainly had learned a lot through all of these things. “Just think, you’ll never do that again,” he cheerily said when I related an incident regarding the flaps.

“Oh, stop trying to give me perspective!” I grumped on my phone.

Here are the learning events of the day:

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Wake Turbulence: I was dismayed to be cleared to taxi to runway 31 with a Citation jet behind me. Nothing like poking along in an old 172 with a sleek jet right on your heels. As I did my run-up near the runway, the Citation was cleared to go ahead of me. I was very much aware — and wary — of wake turbulence, and tower, when clearing me for takeoff, warned me of it also. I waited a while, guessing on how long it would take for it to settle, and then taxiied out onto the runway and took off.

Evidently, I hadn’t waited exactly long enough, though it was mild I think. Nevertheless, it was a freakish take-off and got me started on the hand-shakes right from the get-go.

Turbulence: Hot day. Lotta turbulence. And, the closer I got to Carrington, the lower the level the scattered clouds were at. I remember Mark telling me during lessons that turbulence was worse at the lower altitudes, but because the scattered clouds were many and lower closer to Carrington, I was sort of stuck there.

I don’t mind turbulence as far as when I’m riding in an airplane, but being the solo pilot in a plane as it drops and then shoots upward or tips left and right is not comforting. My left hand, gripping the yoke, was as white as the yoke itself.

Bounce, Go-Around, and Oh S**T!: Arriving at Carrington, I discovered a lot more wind than I had expected. I listened to the weather on the AWOS, and had made note of the wind, but for some reason, combined with the hot updrafts and general bounciness of the descent, I was really expecting it. It was gusty, so I was trying to keep a little extra speed in as I came in for landing. I bounced a little on the landing and though it wasn’t as bad as some I’ve done, I didn’t want to fight and force the landing; the extra speed meant the runway end was approaching and I just didn’t want to chance it. So, go-around. Except I stupidly retracted flaps right after giving it full-throttle and absolutely dropped to just inches above the runway, starting a stall, and remembering reading that when you do that, you lose lift.

“Oh s**t!” was all I could come up with as I reached over and pulled the lever to add in some flaps. I tipped the nose downward, trying to get out of the stall and get in ground effect — “think soft-field landing, Julie!” — skimming across the remainder of the runway, slowly but surely getting a little bit of lift. I have no idea if that was correct procedure, but I guess since I didn’t wreck dad’s plane, it was correct enough.

The next attempt at landing wasn’t pretty, but I stuck it and taxied off the runway, and sighed a huge sigh of relief.

Free and Correct: Soon it was time to fly back to Bismarck, and I was doing the pre-flight out on the deserted Carrington airport ramp. It was then that I discovered the flight controls were sticking in one part of the movement. Because I’m pathetic, the first person I called was dad. I wanted to know, exactly, if this was something that had happened before and what he would suggest I do as far as a fix. There was no answer at home. So, I called Mark.

“Um, exactly how ‘free and correct’ should ‘free and correct’ be?”

I explained the problem, but really, he couldn’t possibly so anything about it, and I didn’t really expect him to. So I wandered across the airport and found a guy who was a crop sprayer, and asked if he would look at it. He climbed in and leaned under the dash and saw that the oil pressure gauge had a tube that had slightly fallen into the path of the steering controls. It was making a bad noise, and blocking full movement. He adjusted it slightly out of the way.

“Yeah,” he said, “that wouldn’t make me rest easy, either. But that should take care of it. Now, if you see oil spitting out on the floor when you start the engine, that might not be good.”

Oh, wow.

Prop Stop: The flight back to Bismarck was uneventful. It was still gusty at Carrington, but the clouds had lessened and were higher, so I was able to put the kabosh on most of the turbulence by flying at a higher altitude. Though there’s not a lot for landmarks, and the high water levels have all but made the water landmarks on the sectional useless, I managed to keep on course pretty well. Soon I was entering a right base for runway 31 at Bismarck. The landing wasn’t a greaser, but it was passable.

Too bad I’d barely landed when the propeller completely stopped.

I’d pulled the throttle to idle when crossing the threshold of the runway, and so I tried to give it a bit more throttle to get it going, but it was done. I was still rolling, however, and decided to try to get it going before telling tower that I might be coming to a stop on the active runway.

I have no idea what the procedure is.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t do what I was supposed to; I simply reached over and pulled the starter while still rolling, and the engine roared back to life. Of course, I’d pushed the throttle in when it had died so I about started a new takeoff roll right before C4, where I was supposed to exit. I got it under control, pulling back on the throttle, glad to note that I hadn’t fried the radios.

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In speaking on the phone with a friend later, I said that I sometimes felt that Chip was run by a complex system of rubber bands. “I have some severe trust issues with that plane.”

I admit to being glad that I was back on the ground, which rather dismays me since a pilot should love to fly and not find it such a constant terrifying experience. I’m not a fan of the solo flying, I admit.