1. Get glider rating before May
2. Get instrument rating before July
3. Fly to the legendary Van Nuys airport, or another airport that's equally far away from Seattle
4. Get tailwheel rating if still have money left
5. Should really start writing a blog about my journey on learning how to fly
So I'll start working on my resolution with a quick review of my 2011.
Jan 2011
Continue traveling in Texas after watching Fighting Illini defeat Bayler Bears and their future Heisman winner RG III in Texas Bowl.
Started the semester by welcoming a new group of transfer students. This is the 4th and last semester that I work for the undergrad admission office as a mentor for transfer students.
Feb - May 2011
Enjoying my last semester in college. Volleyball and Bowling classes are fun. Anthropology is also interesting. Don't have too much to say about my CS courses. The only thing that I don't like very much is the Zen class, which I registered to fulfill the non-western culture requirement, but sure enough as an Asian myself, I passed it without really understanding what the professor was talking about:)
During the spring break, I went to US Air Force museum in Dayton with Scot, which made the flying bug inside me growing much bigger. I'm gonna blame him if I go broke in the future.
Graduated in May. My parents came to the US for the first time to attend my commencement ceremony, and visit NYC, DC and Chicago after that.
June-July 2011
Got my driver's license and new car. Thanks to everyone who had taught me how to drive. I spent most of the time traveling, went to California, Utah, Montana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania. During those trips, I also started finding flight school and reading books about flight training.
Arrived in WA on July 25th. I visited the Museum of Flight on the following day. The day after that, July 27th, I had my discovery flight in a Cessna 172! We took off from Snohomish and flew south to Snoqualmie Fall and headed west to land on Boeing Field before heading back. I would spend the next 10 days or so to go through FAA and TSA to get approved to start flight training as a non US citizen. While I was waiting for TSA to collect my finger prints, I didn't waste a minute and I had my first glider training on July 31st.
August-September
My first private pilot lesson happened on August 6th, right after I got approval from TSA and pass the medical exam. Had a hard time taxiing the plane and turn the plane onto the grass a few times, lol. Taking advantage of the good weather and long day time, I was making good progress on both glider and powered airplane trainings and getting closer and closer to my first solo.
October
Summer is completely over and weather is bad in Seattle area, couldn't get too much time flying the glider. I had my first solo on Oct 16th, flying 3 traffic patterns around Harvey field, and the third landing was quite perfect! I was actually not as neverous as I thought I would be.
November-December
Glider club stopped operation starting November until March next year. Helped the club cleaning and disassembling the gliders on the first weekend. Continue my single engine airplane training and started cross country training. Cross country training during the winter in pacific northwest is absolutely painful, because it's really hard to find a good day that both the departure airport and destination airport are having a reasonable good weather. Before every flight I need to spend one or two hours to plan and complete a navigation log form, and very likely at the end the weather is not good enough to fly and I have to redo it next time because stuffs like wind, temperature and pressure is different every time. I received my solo cross country endorsement before thanksgiving week is over, but I wouldn't get my first solo cross country flight from Harvey to Bellingham done until mid December. I went on to have a few more solo cross country flights and also finished my night training on the last weekend of the year.
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