Me: How’d Chip do today? Get some good flight time for your logbook?

Friend: Chip did great. I added air to the tires. Took it up to 10,500.

Me: Wow! 10,500! Is that even legal in Chip?

Friend: Sure, why wouldn’t it be? Only took me 20 minutes to get there. (sarcasm there)

Me: It just seems so high. I’m aware I sound like a doofus.

———-

I know that airplanes go in the air, and the air goes up plenty high, and that planes most certainly go higher than 10,500 and that C172′s can go that high and and and…

…but Chip seems so earthbound.

Whatever the case, it’s nice to know Chip went on a flight that wasn’t unplanned during a severe thunderstorm event without a pilot.

“I’m afraid I’m going to flunk!” I said repeatedly to my flight instructor friend.

“It’s not a test. You can’t flunk. You don’t lose your certificate,” he said.

He is completely used to my over-zealous concern with flunking things. Just about all of the blog posts and cartoons that I created back when I was learning to fly in 2008 have a hint of a fear of the pass-fail. I ate, slept, and breathed my Jeppesen study materials in preparation for the written test.

Amazing, then, how rusty I felt after a year and a half absence from the left seat of the airplane.

First, there was the hour-plus ground school requirement, which had me dragging out the sectional and paper navigation log and slogging through the cobwebs in my brain to remember how to use the E6B and the POH and come up with the correct information. It’s amazing how quickly the TAFs and METARs become Greek.

Soon we were in the plane, a 172 I hadn’t flown before, which meant I needed to figure out where the instruments were and remind myself useful basics, such as the difference between throttle and mixture. I was never so glad for a checklist. I love the checklist.

Towards the end it started to feel familiar, but it took a while. There was some unimpressive flying at the beginning while I attempted to get on course and maintain altitude. My steep turns were fair at the start. The real challenge, though, was going to be the landings.

Oh, the landings.

Several of my attempts gave me two landings instead of just one.

You only flunk a landing if you can’t reuse the plane. That’s what I’m telling myself.

“Remember to flare, and not force it on the runway,” I was told.

All in all, things went fine, though I have to remember to wait until I’ve taxied off of the runway before worrying about things like the flaps and turning off the carburetor heat since, in the heat of just-landed and talking on the radio and worrying about taxiing and an unfamiliar plane, it’s pretty easy to accidentally push the throttle in all the way instead of the carb heat.

That makes for an exciting near take-off on taxiway Charlie towards the GA ramp.

But other than that, I’m current.

I happily signed up, and made note of the webinar on my calendar.

At 8:00 p.m. I logged on with my headset all plugged in, ready to go.

This webinar is over, the screen said. That was a disappointment, and a confusion. Here I sat, wanting to learn about thunderstorms as a still-novice pilot, an actual thunderstorm bearing down on Bismarck as I waited.

The webinar was a no-go.

It was then that I realized I probably should have started with the idiot’s section of webinars, the ones that cover basic time zone understanding.

Because 8 p.m. EDT is a little different than 8 p.m. CDT.

I wish I could express the level of annoyance I have with myself right now.

This morning I flew across the river to Mandan’s fly-in event in my Cherokee… Jeep Cherokee, that is, and not Piper. My dad’s airplane hasn’t been here since last fall.

The weather wasn’t too bad. There were some clouds and overcast moments, but the turnout was pretty good and it was better than last year’s weather, which was a torrential downpour and thick clouds which meant there was little flying in to the fly-in.

I took photos and videos of some of the planes with my phone. Duggy, a very happy DC-3 who I’d seen a few years back in the Fargo Air Museum, was there. Spray planes, pontoon planes, planes with huge bush tires, helpicopters, tail draggers, low-wings — all the usual suspects. You can see these photos here.

It was a nice morning. I haven’t been up flying for a long while, so it was nice to get a little taste of aviation, even if only on the ground. The breakfast line was hugely long and extended out of the hangar, so I never did get a taste of that maple syrup.