It's been two weeks after I passed my check ride and I have finally received that lovely green plastic pilot certificate in mail. I have to say that I am surprised by myself that I hadn't wasted a single minute before I started reading instrument flying ground school material. This has never happened to me in college or high school. Usually after the final exams I would never want to read even one more line of textbook, but I guess it's different if I'm reading something that I truely love and passionate about.
Besides the not-extremely-interesting reading, I also managed to have four flights in the last two weekends, one flight per day.
The first one was the initial checkout of Skyhawk 172N. After spending 60 hours in the C152, Skyhawk looks like a giant plane to me. To make things even more challenging, it's gusting about 20-30 knots that day. Because the ceiling is too low for maneuver, I was just practicing patterns at S43(still great practice for ground reference maneuver). Feeling awkward with the flight control, trying to read the new call sign when announcing my position, and adjusting for the strong winds, I felt like I'm a new student again. In addition, I also had some problems on maintaining the center line on final because the plane is wider than the 152. When my instructor told me that I'm way off the centerline, I still thought I'm perfectly align with it. After a few more patterns including one or two go arounds, I finally feel better with the C172N and called it a day.
The second flight was quite a bad decision, I shouldn't takeoff in the first place. The ceiling is generally 3000-6000 in west WA while KPAE has probably the lowest around the area with less than 2000AGL. The icing level is about 2000MSL. So eager to build up the X-C time, I decided to give it a try. After filing the flight plan and getting the weather brief for a "short" trip to Port Angeles, I figured as long as I can fly around Paine field, the rest of the trip there will be only some scatter clouds at 3000. So I took off and flew around the cloud above Paine, then I noticed that the sky isn't as clear as the WX Brief reported. When I looked back to Paine, the weather situation is deteriorating quickly. I was pretty sure that I can reach on KCLM without any problem, but I really didn't think I can fly back to Snohomish in VFR condition 1 or 2 hours later. So I decided to cancel the flight and headed back. This turn out to be a good decision. In the last 5 miles before I reach Harvey, it started raining and the visibility is quickly drop to probably 3-5sm and I was flying into the pattern in pouring rain. Thank God I was not above the icing level when it rained :)
The third flight is just a continuation of the C172N check out. After finding a big hole in the cloud, we tried all those standard manuvers like steep turns, slow flight, stalls, engine failure, and went back to do some short/soft field T/O and landings. During the last landing my CFI pulled the power to idle on downwind and ask to me to have a precise short field landing, telling me I need to master that for commercial license anyway(200 hrs away from that...), and I made that landing pretty well. Got signed off on the C172N.
The last flight I had today was a little surprise. I was intending to get some night practice in the C172N, but the plane reaches its inspection time. Because the other N model at Harvey does not have a working landing light, the FBO decided to give me the S model without charging me the extra price. Sweet! I can check out the C172S while only paying for the price of a C172N. I had a few touch & go at KAWO before both my instructor and me realized that I'm not a student pilot anymore and now I need full stop for the night currency to carry passengers. So we started doing full stops, some at Arlington, some at Harvey. We also took advantage of the clear sky to finish checking out those flight manuvers in the S model. Now I just need to finish a questionair about the S model to get signed off. Because most likely I'll be training in C172S for the instrument rating, I'm glad that I get to spend some time on it now.
In addition to the flying, I've been actively looking for my next flight school for IFR training. Sent a few emails and made some phone calls to different FBOs. One FBO gave me some cold response that really pissed me off(they did the very same thing when I was looking for private pilot training, I guess they never learned). The good news is that the FBO that all my friend and co-workers had highly recommended is getting its Part 141 approved next month, meaning I don't need to build that many X-C hours to train with them now. And I need to spend a couple weeks on glider anyway. So they'll be Part141 school when I'm ready to start. What a good timing! More importantly, the owner is polite and patient on answering my questions.
With the glider club starts running again next weekend, I'll be spliting the weekend for glider training and powered airplane practices(or maybe giving friends a few rides if weather is nice). Can't wait for the next weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment