Category: Flying

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Flying General Rants

Birthday Day Stress and Lesson 5

The day started off a little rough, with an early awakening for a conference call, and didn’t really get much better from then on out. Yes, its my birthday, and my mother’s birthday, and now Steve and April’s newest born’s birthday. And sadly, it is also Ben Affleck’s birthday too. That was a real downer to learn about.

I did manage to sneak out of the office a little bit early and get in another flying lesson. This time it was all about not paying attention to the gauges and just “feeling” the plane. Good thing too, as the sky was busy with all sorts of other planes. In the end, I got a bit frazzled and really mucked up the landing, and made errors on the radio so that the tower people were confused, I’m sure.

Why is it that we celebrate birthday’s again? I think I’ll go sleep, then fly to LA in the morning, and think about it.

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Flying

Lesson 4: Radio Work and Landings

Today I had the fourth (I think) flying lesson in Palo Alto. It was a real doozy as it required me to talk to the airport tower as well as setup and land (or attempt to land) the plane.

As expected, it was a minor success bookended by a series of incremental failures. I don’t have any idea what I’m saying to the tower at this point, what the ATIS is saying to me, and I certainly had a lot of mess to deal with on the take-off roll and landing. Tail-dragger aircraft sure are tough to manage.

The instructor said I did pretty well but I feel tired, beat up, and more than a little bent at all the mistakes I made. I’m still chasing some of the instruments and over-correcting for climb and descent. It sure seems to be a chore to keep all the stuff juggling in my head.

I can only hope that I get better soon, as the real dollars start adding up with the next flight: local flying club membership, books, supplies, headsets, and insurance. And the flight instruction costs go up starting on the next lesson too, since I’m now committing to the whole deal there are no more free (or discounted) rides. The rubber meets the road from here on out.

It should be a good feeling to fly at some point, but right now all I see are the mistakes I’m making.  Hopefully it will smooth out and I’ll worry less while enjoying more.

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Flying Rants Travel

Crappy Commercial Flights

I had the great displeasure of flying from Oakland to Seattle this past Friday, just after the new “liquids ban” was put in place for all commercial aviation. This change seems to have completely fubar’d the airports, leaving an overworked air system even more in disarray.

All told, I spent 7 hours in two airports for 5 hours of meetings in a remote office. I would like to say that the face to face time was worth it, but I have to question how useful travel is when things are as painful as they now are at major airports. Kudos

Kudos TSA, you once again have shown you are as ready for handling disaster as FEMA is. And that’s no compliment, I assure you.

Categories
Flying General

Full Scale Flight

After three tries at it I believe I’m now committed enough create a new category for my newest activity: learning to fly.

This Saturday I flew with an instructor in a Citbabria trainer around the Western SF bay area. According to the instructor, I’m “a natural” and he kept asking me “have you done this before?” These are his words, not mine. Evidently I don’t suck, is what he is saying.

That’s good, because learning to fly takes time and money. And I’d hate to suck at it and not know that until a good chunk of my savings were gone. Luckily, it looks like I can just concentrate on not sucking and leave the rest of my worries til a later date.

Wish me luck.

Citabria