Day 134 ( 220.8 TT, 145.9 MET )

I'm soon to finish my time building (27 hours left). I'm kind of taking my time with this, I lost a week sailing (see post below) and will lose two more with the trip to Colorado this week. To be honest, I'm a little disappointed with this phase of the flight training. I thought I would visit all these glamorous places, but the way Aviator has it setup, you fly at night 90% of the time. No romantic scenery, and not a living soul in any of the closed airports you land at. I wanted to fly to Colorado in a duchess, but the school didn't let me (too many maintenance issues, and they did not want to fly out mechanics that far again if we broke down in Colorado. I say again because two weeks prior a plane broke down in Vegas, but it seems like they always break down in Vegas). Also I wanted to stay in Colorado for 3-4 days, and they started crying about how much revenue they would lose on a plane sitting on the ground for that long. Right.

I also tried to move out of the school housing (you save $200 - $300 a month by living somewhere else), but the admin people said that they would charge me $5K if I moved out early (I HAVE to stay with them for 5 months per the contract). I argued that most of my classmates moved out months ago. The housing was overfilled back then they said. Now there are too many empty rooms and they are losing revenue, so they can't let me go. I'm so disappointed with this school, a school that puts so much emphasis on their revenue and so little on it's customers (us, the students).

Two guys from GoJet visited the school last week. They setup interviews for guys with 800hrs or more. Only several instructors have that kind of hours around here, so it was kind of depressing for the rest of us.

On a more positive note, we did manage to get some interesting flights in on the weekends. Visited a warbird museum in Titusville (right on the field at KTIX), flew to Craig (KCRG, jail right next to the runway), landed at Whitted Field (KSPG, cool approach over the water and great restaurant on the field), also Venice (KVNC, great food at Sharkys on the Pier, my windiest landing, 19kts, gusting 28) and finally Tallahassee (KTLH) which has the coolest FBO I've seen yet. For $40 landing fee you get a brand new BMW as a crew car for a few hours. It took us five minutes to figure out how to start the thing (hey it doesn't have keys, ok?)




Above is us on final into KTLH. On top of the panel you can see the Dual GPS receiver that feeds nav data to my iPad. I can't fly without that thing anymore, especially in the planes without GPS. It's not that I can't navigate using VOR/NDB, it's that Aviator doesn't have any planes with decently working NAV or ADF receivers. I still remember the flight from Savannah, GA. Middle of the night, over the Atlantic, the coast is somewhere in the fog to the west, and we can't pick up a VOR that's barely 20 miles away. Below are pics of the pier in Venice, me in the plane, and an updated map of my flights.