Day 55 ( 115.1 TT, 40.2 MET )

This was a busy week. On thursday, Aviator hosted a Thanksgiving lunch for all of the students that didn't have a chance to visit their families. Which was like 70%. The food was made by the students and was really good. Now that I have to cook myself, I pay a lot of attention to new tasty dishes.

Did a lot of flying under the hood, progressing through the instrument lessons pretty quick. Started working on approaches, the workload is now tripled, compared to visual flight. Its really easy to miss things on the checklist when you have to fly the plane, setup and brief the approach, and work the radios. Everybody says that I will get used to it, but for now I come home dead tired and squeezed of any energy.

Today I drove to the cape to watch the launch of NASAs Mars Lab, another rover that will once again, surprise, look for life on Mars. It seems like they can't come up with a different mission profile for a multi-million dollar rover. Anyways, I will never get to see a live shuttle launch, so I decided to at least see a rocket launch. Below is a shot of the rocket as it flew through several cloud layers and quickly vanished in the sky.

Day 45 ( 106.6 TT, 30.7 MET )

My first aviation milestone! I passed 100 hrs total flight time this week! Finished the instrument ground school today, so now I will have more time to fly. This week I have been averaging three flight hours a day, so moving through this instrument training pretty quick. Did my first ILS approach, DME arcs, and holds. Passed my instrument stage one check as well, which was fairly simple, VOR, NDB, and localizer intercepts, and all the basic maneuvers, except everything is done under the hood of course. Next week will be a lot slower since a lot of instructors are leaving town for thanksgiving. That's actually a good break for me, I need the time to prepare for my instrument FAA written test.

And now for the usual incident report. Only one this week! During a night flight, had some weird gear issues (didn't want to come up, then only two out of the three would lock down), finally we just did a manual gear extension and got the "three in the green". Didn't want to risk it, so we flew with the gear down all the way back to the airport. I'm starting to get used to these planes, so whenever something goes wrong I now know how to calmly look at the problem and follow procedures instead of being emotional. So in a weird way, flying 35 year old planes will make you a better pilot then a new one!

Day 38 ( 94.5 TT, 19.6 MET )

I'm both sad and happy to write this post. Happy because I finally got my multi-private rating this morning. Sad, because it took two weeks of waiting, a drive up to the Orlando FSDO because of paperwork problems, and worst of all, a practical test failure. I should have listened to my fellow students when they said "don't fly with McColgan, he will fail you to make more money on the retake. People don't like him, so he doesn't have a lot of students." I didn't believe that, but now I think it happened to me. I needed to save some time, other examiners are booked up for months but this guy is always available. And for a reason.

The entire check ride went fine, did all my maneuvers within PTS (practical test standards). When we were flying back to Ft. Pierce, he asked me to do a short-field landing. Under the conditions (landing 10R, wind 040@15kt gusting to 19) the landing was really good. Wind correction applied, on center line, and airline soft. BUT I touched down 250' after the thousand foot markers. The PTS allows only 200' but that's under ideal weather, and the examiner should, at their discretion, curve the results a bit. McColgan's discretion was to fail me, and do a retake (another $250), which I passed with no problems this morning. So if there are people out there reading this, if you plan to attend here, avoid John McColgan. He will scream at you during the entire flight, point and grunt instead of giving you clear directions, and get even more upset when you ask to clarify. The school has two other designated examiners, and you can always call the FSDO for an FAA examiner (and save $400)

Anyways, lesson learned. I'm happy to move on to my instrument flight training. Right now I'm looking for a different instructor (my guy got hired with American Eagle and is packing up for an early December departure, I'm jealous). Below is the weather we have been getting lately, not very Florida like.