I'm Officially a Student Pilot!!!

As you can see it's been a while since I posted here. I haven't flown since 2009 and I'm back! I've got 17.2 hours spread out over the years starting in 2003. I've just never had the money to keep going. This time... I think I'm good to go!

Two weeks ago I went to Chandler Air Service at my local airport to inquire about starting up my flying again. The instructor that I talked to was very nice and told me that I would probably have to start fresh since my flying time is so spread out. This information wasn't a surprise to me. He did advise me to go get my 3rd class medical which I haven't ever done.

I passed my medical with flying colors, which wasn't really an accomplishment to be honest. The doctor checked that I could see, hear and breath, and I was out the door with my medical and my brand new student pilot certificate! For some reason that tiny piece of paper saying I'm a student pilot makes it feel a little more real this time around.

It's been almost two weeks since I've been to the airport to talk to the instructor and I still haven't been contacted. He said that they have meetings to assign instructors to students on Tuesdays and today is the 2nd Tuesday since we've talked. I'm getting a little frustrated by the lack of communication and have started looking elsewhere for instruction. If the communication is this bad just trying to get some instruction... what am I to expect when I actually start?

No matter where I end up getting my instruction, I'm very excited to get started! This time I'm going all the way!

Friends

It's nice having friends that fly. That way when you are in a money slump like me.. you can still get up there... on their dime! :) That's what I got to do today. Granted I was in the back of the aircraft with no control, it is still really nice to get in the air and experience flight. There is nothing else like it. Steve had to log another 1.8 with his instructor before he could be signed off for the commercial check-ride, which he hopes to schedule this week. If you ask me.... he's ready, but who am I to tell. Steve is a great pilot, and I enjoy flying with him very much. Besides, the closer he gets to his CFI, the closer I get to having some free instruction. Well, I might have to buy a case of beer every once in a while... but hey... that is still cheap! lol. Anyway, just wanted to report back here in case someone is still reading. I don't know if anybody checks on this unless I post on the aviation boards. If you are still checking in for updates, I would love to hear from you. What do you do when you can't fly? Just leave a comment. I think it is easy to do. Talk to you later!

Real Life

I am changing jobs and it is a good thing. I will be making more money and have potential for higher bonuses, which means more flying. Unfortunately they pay bi-weekly and all my bills are set up for weekly pay. Things will be tight for a month or so until we adjust, so flying is on hold for now. It really sucks because I am so close to solo, but during this break I am going to try and get my medical out of the way. That should only be like 50 bucks or so, so that should be no big deal. I will update you all when I start flying again. Thanks for reading!

I just recently found out that I have some readers at work too! That was very exciting news for me. I hope to bring you all some exciting new adventures soon!

Joe

Networking

So I am a little late posting about this, but I didn't want to leave it out of the blog. Last week I had a chance to meet up with a friend from the forums. His name is Ken and he owns a Senecca III. You can look at it here http://www.klrdmd.com/Home/Seneca.html That plane is so awesome. And guess what... I got to log my time in it because he is a CFI. So me... a student with only about 15 hours has 1.4 in a multi-engine aircraft. Kinda fricken cool.

So Ken emailed me on Wednesday night to see if I wanted to go grab some breakfast the following morning. Of course my response was nothing short of YES!!!! How could I possibly say no to that? I got to the airport around 730 and wasn't expecting him til 8. I sat in the truck and listened to the scanner waiting for his call sign. Sure enough at 745 I hear "Chandler tower, Senecca 8377X 15 miles south with Kilo, request full stop" Woot.. I jumped out of my truck and headed for the terminal. I listened to the radio and followed him on the frequency until he pulled up to the terminal. I walked out the plane to meet him. What a beautiful plane.

Ken is a great guy. He is a dental anaesthesiologist and I guess more of a teacher now. He travels the country giving lectures and whatnot. Not a bad gig. Sounds like fun. I would rather be traveling talking about planes.. but I'm not a dentist so I wouldn't have much to talk about. Anyway...

As I approach the plane Ken motions me inside to the left seat. I must have looked thoroughly confused because he explained that he could ride right seat because he is a CFI and MEI so I could actually fly the plane. OMG! I jumped in got situated and looked at the panel. Now you have to understand this situation to fully appreciate it. Up to this point I have flown a 1 engine Cessna 172. About as basic as it gets. Now I get in the left seat of this thing and it might as well have been an airliner. Well that is a little extreme but you know what I mean. It turns out it wasn't that difficult. This plane has two engines so instead of doing everything once... you do it twice. You start the left engine, then the right. Check instruments for both of them and you are ready to go. I let Ken handle the radios so I could concentrate on not crashing his 120,000$ plane into anything. We picked up ATIS and taxi'd out to runway 4L.

This is where it really gets fun. After being cleared to takeoff I positioned us on the numbers. Once all lined up he told me to hold the breaks and throttle both engines up to 36 inches of manifold pressure. (if I knew completely what that meant I would take time to explain it to you... I need to do some reading and maybe I will put it in my next post. But for the purpose of this entry... We put the needles on the 36 mark on the instrument displaying inches of manifold pressure.) Ok so here we are... breaks held on the numbers... engines cranking away just waiting to lurch forward.. Once I got both engines equal.. let go of the breaks and WOOOOOOOOW! ZOOOOOOM! (I have other way to describe the feeling sorry) Every other plane I have flown in you slowly increase throttle and go down the runway. This thing went screamin' after you released the breaks. Rotate at 79 and away you go. I barely had to give any rudder pressure with this plane. Ken explained that it doesn't have all the normal left turning tendencies of other planes because the engines rotate opposite of each other counteracting torque. (Did I explain that right?) So we get cleared to turn away from the airport and we are on our way. Basically Ken did what Dan did. He pointed to a mountain and said fly there. The whole time Ken was naming mountain peaks and airports in the distance. I guess he flies this route quite a bit, so he knows it by heart. We saw an aerobatic plane doing it's thing around a mountain. That was pretty cool. You see them do the shows at airshows, but it is a totally different view when you are flying over them. I leveled us off at 5,500 ft and we just cruised. It was much easier to maintain altitude and heading in this plane. I'm not sure why, but it just flies smoother than the Cessna.

As we got close to AVQ-Merana Regional, we announced our intentions to land and Ken put it down. I got us on the approach and ken took over a couple hundred feet above the runway. He says it's because it lands differently than the Cessna I fly, which I'm sure it does, but I'm pretty sure it was because he didn't want a student pilot with 15 hours pounding his nice Senecca into the pavement. Somehow... I understand. :)

I taxi'd us to the parking and flipped it around. Ran through the shutdown checklist and secured the aircraft. Time for breakfast! Breakfast was good! I had a Western Omelet... yum. We sat and talked about a lot of things. He has owned I think 7 aircraft now. The Mooney was his favorite, and that is probably what he will go back to after this one. What a life. I would love to own an aircraft like this. I would do the same thing. I would find young people who love to fly and let them. Why not? He did get breakfast out of it. Granted he said that a full tank of gas costs about $1,000, so I think I ended up spending less money. He wouldn't accept money for fuel, what a great guy.

After breakfast we came back out and started it up. Wind was favoring 30 so that's where we taxi'd to. As we get up to takeoff there was a Cessna doing touch and goes opposite of our runway. That is the joy of an uncontrolled airport. You can do whatever you want. If you want to takeoff and land with the wind... you can. Not that you should but he did. Oh well, when he took off again and was crossing us on the runway we took the runway and blasted outta there before he knew what was going on. I think before he even turned crosswind we were above pattern altitude cruising on out. Fun stuff.

This time once we got to cruise altitude he let me try out the autopilot. LOL how cool. Push a couple buttons and the plane flies itself. That was cool and all... but I kinda wanted to fly. (Now I know I don't want to be an airline pilot.) I popped the autopilot off and hand flew the rest of the way home. I handled radios this time. Got the ATIS, contacted tower at 15 miles out. This is one little mishap that I did. I called the wrong tower frequency. At chandler there are two frequencies. 133.1 if you are coming from the South or the East and 126.1 if you are coming from the North or East. Now we were coming up from Tuscon area so I should have contacted 133.1 which I KNEW. Anyway.. I called the wrong tower .. they told me I was stupid and I made the same call on the right frequency. Before I knew it we were on the ground and it was all over.

It made for a great morning. It was beautiful outside as always. Couldn't ask for more. So for 20 bucks I got 1.4 of multi-engine cross country time. What a smokin deal. Thank you Ken! I appreciate it so much. Another entry in the logbook that I will never forget!

Not so hot!

Aircraft: C4653G

Weather: HOT! Winds 190@8G18 - felt that!

Finally I got back in the air after 2 weeks of no flying. I have been dying to get back up there. Last week money was tight, so I had to put it off, no way around it. This week I invited my father-in-law, Joe to go up with us. What a great trip!

This is the first time with me flying that I actually got to fly somewhere. Normally for training up until this point we just fly around the pattern or go out to the practice area. This time we flew from Chandler Municipal over to Williams Gateway, which is about 10 miles away. Nothing big, but fun because they are slightly busier with some military jets, and some airline activity, and they have a great restaurant. This was the true 100$ hamburger that I got to fly!

I showed up with Joe at about 1030 to pre-flight 53G and Dan was already there. No big deal, did the pre-flight, told Joe a little bit about what I was doing and why. I think Dan is learning to trust me a little bit more because he didn't do his own pre-flight right behind me this time. HA. After the pre-flight, we headed into the air conditioning and talked about the flight we were about to undertake. Dan had a sectional and we went over what all the markings and identifiers meant on and around Gateway. After grabbing some waters, we were off to the aircraft again, this time to FLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

With Joe all secure in the back and everyone adjusted, I picked up the ATIS on the speaker before cranking the engine. This saves me a little buck, because why sit there on the taxi-way with the engine turning? I taxi'd up to the tower to make my ground call, and all went well. Got cleared to taxi over to 22R via Alpha, November. Thanks to my excellent night before preparation I was prepared and wrote everything down and read it back like a pro. I had all the frequencies lined up for CHD and IWA with Chandlers on Radio one and Gateway on Radio two. All I had to do was flip a switch and I was ready to transmit on the Gateway frequencies. So... we taxi'd over to 22R and did the runup, made our call and we were off!

We climbed to about 2800ft and leveled off and headed towards Gateway. Since we took off on 22R we were headed SW which is away from Gateway so we turned to set ourselves up to enter their airspace. This is where things started happening fast. We had very little time before hitting their airspace, so I had to pick up the ATIS and call tower. Dan was rushing me the whole time. After getting the ATIS, I made my call to tower and I don't know what happened. In fact I keep playing it over in my head and just can't figure it out. I made the perfect call and she never got back to me. She cleared other people to land and enter the airspace but I didn't get mine. Whatever, Dan said to call again. So I did, and everything was fine. The problem was, were outside their airspace doing circles, and I had accidentally let us climb to almost 4000ft, which was approaching PHX class Bravo airspace. For those of you that don't know... that is a NO NO! So finally she calls out our tail number and we get our clearance into the Delta airspace and set up for a right downwind pattern entry. By this time my head is really spinning because I haven't flown in two weeks, and I need to do a whole bunch of stuff before I can land. So I start my decent, enter the patter too high, pull the power back to 1700 abeam the numbers, kick in some flaps, turn base late, end up being too high, kick in more flaps and FINALLY I am on track for a good landing. This particular runway at Gateway has over 10000ft of runway so that landing wasn't a problem, and was actually relatively smooth. We exit onto taxiway Hotel (I think) and make our call to ground. "C4653G clear of 12R @ Hotel, taxi to transient near the restaurant". We got clearance to go and park at the FBO and pulled up next to an old HUGE navy fighter. I think Dan said it was a T-6, I will add a picture at the bottom and you can correct me if I'm wrong. After I shut the engine down the line guy comes running up telling us we weren't supposed to park there. Dan was trying to signal with him where to park, but the line guy apparently didn't know the correct signals because he was telling Dan to start his left engine. LOL. Needless to say, Dan wasn't moving and we got some chalks to secure the aircraft. Good times!

Lunch was great, it was pretty uneventful compared to the flying, but what can be better than 3 guys flying to an airport to grab a burger. I'll tell you..... NOTHING. There is NOTHING better than flying with some friends to an airport for some food. I can't frickin wait to get my certificate so I can do just that. Take a Saturday morning and go fly for food.

Anyway, after lunch we decide to head out and do some pattern work at Chandler. I did a total of 4 landings there, all of which sucked! You could really tell that it had been a while since I landed. Dan was on the controls more and I was getting extremely frustrated. Once again I sucked with my rudder control and kept cross controlling while turning crosswind and base. Dan thinks I'm trying to kill myself. (the airplane can enter a spin if you are not careful and cross control. A spin itself is not dangerous, but when you are close the ground in the pattern, you just don't have time to recover. I think next lesson we are going to the practice area to once and for all fix my problem with the rudder. Dan said he has some special exercises to fix it. So landing 1 not so hot, I didn't flare very well and we landed on all threes. Landing 2 not so hot, I landed HARD. BOOM! Landing 3 Dan was trying to show me how to stay 3 ft above the runway for a flare and ended up having to just land himself because we would of had a hard time getting up enough speed w/ a passenger in the back. Landing 4 not so bad, I finally flared good and put her down on the main gear first and did it semi-correctly. BUT... the airplane is not broken, and we are alive so.. SUCCESS!

My radio shyness is gone, every time I get on the radio I know what to say and thank god, because that is what used to give me such a heart-attack. Things are good now that I am able to fly again, but they need to improve. I wish I could go twice a week, but at least I need to get up there once a week so I don't forget things and waste my money.

Joe if you are reading this (and you better be) thanks for riding along. I hope you can get into this at some point yourself. I would love for you to take a lesson and let me fly along. You are welcome on any flight that I take as long as we aren't stalling the airplane cuz even though it would probably be ok... I like life. :) ---- Oh and thanks for lunch!

For everyone else.. thanks for reading! You know what to do.... click those adds! MONEY MONEY MONEY!!!! I will return the favor if I can.. just tell me where to go!

This flight: 1.2

Total time: 13.3

$

So another thing that I'm pretty sure a lot of student pilots go through. This week I can't fly. Not because of the weather, I live in Arizona, but because money got in the way. It sucks but it is reality. For some reason Arizona decides that it should cost 400$ to register our truck. The really crappy thing about it is that it is windy this weekend and I need to do ground reference maneuvers. Oh well... next week.

Oh ya.. don't forget to click on the adds! :)

More Right Rudder!

Aircraft: C172 4653G

Weather: 90 degrees, wind 070@5, beautiful as usual

More right rudder... Words every student probably hears a whole lot of. I'm pretty sure I have it the worst! That isn't even the worst of it. I don't use enough ,or any, rudder in any of my turns. What is going on? For some reason I am afraid to push on any of the controls too hard. The word for next lesson is AGGRESSIVE. Be more aggressive with the controls.

So today was great! Dan emailed me a couple days ago and said that there would be no wind today, so instead of doing our lesson on ground reference maneuvers, we would do some pattern work, and learn how to land. AWESOME. I love to land! It is so much fun taking off and landing, taking off and landing! Total I landed 7 times, with help from Dan. Mostly he kept pushing the nose down and telling me to aim at the numbers. (for the non-fliers, each runway is marked with numbers. For example, the runway we were landing and departing from was 4L. That means it's heading, magnetic I believe, is 040, which is NE.) Basically when you are landing you are supposed to be on a 3 degree glideslope, and you want to touch down within the first third of the runway. On final you keep the airspeed at about 55-65 knots with the flaps down, and at about 20 feet off the runway pull the power to idle. At 10 feet off the runway start the flare (holding back on the controls to keep the nose up) and at 3 feet try and prevent the airplane from landing by pulling back to the stops. You have to do this all while maintaining heading w/ the rudder. A lot of the problems that I had were rudder related. I would come down, and flare correctly but then I would just stop flying the airplane and let it drift off center, or it would just SMACK into the runway, which is not good. Dan kept saying I was doing a good job, but I don't see it. These were my first few landing so I'm not too worried about sucking at it only a few hours in, but Dan is talking about soloing me. I'm pretty certain I could do it, but I definitely need more practice.

Here is the full procedure from takeoff to landing, just in case you are interested, and also for me to write down and make sure I know it.

Takeoff is easy, just keep the aircraft centered down the runway and apply full power. Watch the gauges to make sure oil pressure/temp is ok and keep right rudder in because of the strong left turning tendencies of the plane. At 55 knots lift the nose off the ground and climb out. When the wheels leave the ground the left turning tendency increases so you have to increase right rudder. About 500 feet AGL (above ground level) start the crosswind turn. Left aileron, left rudder. By this time you are probably at pattern altitude so reduce power slightly and start turning downwind. Again left aileron, left rudder. On downwind slow the aircraft by pulling power to 2100 RPM, carb heat on, 1 notch of flaps. (all at the same time) At this point you have a few seconds to complete the before landing checklist. I did it 7 times so lets see if I can remember it off the top of my head.... Seat upright, seat belts on, Altimeter check, Heading indicator check, Mixture rich, fuel selector on both, make sure carb heat is on.... Yep I got it. Sweet. So you are cruising along on downwind, listening to ATC for landing clearance, or whatever else they want to tell you (today was crazy, but that is another story), looking for traffic, and waiting to come up abeem the numbers. This means you are directly across the edge of the runway you will be landing on. At this point, start a 500fpm descent, power to 1700 RPM, and another notch of flaps. Once at a 45 degree angle to the landing runway, start the turn to base, and keep the descent at 500 fpm. When you come up on the runway start the turn to final and throw in a nother notch of flaps. On final set up the airspeed to be 55-65 knots and aim at the numbers. That's pretty much it. I went over the actual landing in the previous paragraph so I won't go over that again. Oh, and for a touch and go, which is what we were doing... after landing and you are stabilized going down the runway, flaps up, carb heat off, full power... do it all again. FUN FUN!

I mentioned the controller up a little bit. I don't want to pass too much judgement because I am new to this game too, but the controller we were dealing with in the air had to be a newb. He was getting all stressed out, called my base turn way to early, cancelled our landing clearance a couple times... Craziness. I mean I guess that's what I'm going to be dealing with in the "real world" but I was just trying to land and this dude was throwing all kinds of stuff at me. Like I said, it is probably good because I learned a lot, but Dan was getting annoyed. He said if the controller gives an instruction that you cannot follow, you are the PIC. You are the one responsible for the safety of the flight. So if they tell you to do a touch and go, and you can't make it happen, too bad!

Anyway, it was a great flight. Next time we go up I think we are going to be working on rudder control in the practice area. Dan said to bring a puke bag because he has some fun exercises to teach me control, but I should be ok. Looks like I need to get going on my medical. I need to have a 3rd class medical in order to solo, and Dan is harping on that, so I guess I should go out and get it. I think that is going to cost another 90 bucks, so I have to figure out how to work that in. I'll figure it out. I can't wait to get up again. That's the thing I hate about learning to fly... you have to come back down. 1 hour just isn't long enough.

Oh, I almost forgot to remind you.. click on my adds! I could really use the clicks. They were going good for a while, and it seems that.. unless I ask, people don't click. Honestly I wouldn't either unless someone asked because I hate adds. But to help an aspiring pilot.. I would click away!!!!!

Today's flight: 1.1 hrs

Total time: 12.1 hrs