Day 114 ( 162 TT, 87.1 MET )

I have a confession to make. I signed up to facebook. Yep. I resisted for as long as I could, honest. But it seems these days it's impossible to stay in touch with people any other way. So now you will see share icons on these posts, so share away!

A friend of mine invited me to sail with him from Punta Gorda to Key West. I agreed, since he ensured me that the trip will take only two days. A couple of nice time builders flew me to Punta Gorda and off we went sailing the gulf of mexico. The entire ordeal took seven days! Several of those we spent grounded waiting for high tide (I guess nobody onboard knew how to read a marine chart), and one day I spent sea sick (some pilot I am). Below is a picture I call "studying hard on deck, in Key West"


Once we sailed into Key West, I called my buddies to pick me up. They flew in late Friday night. I threw my stuff onboard and bummer, one of the main tires went flat. It didn't happen on landing or taxi, it just deflated siting there on the ramp. So we found a hotel and stayed the night. Saturday morning, Mike (owner of the school) flew in a mechanic with a new wheel.

On the way back my friend wanted some excitement and decided to hug the coast instead of a straight shot to Ft. Pierce. Because of Miami international airport, ATC made us follow the coast line, at 500' or below (that way we don't disrupt the traffic into MIA). Below are a couple of shots of us whizzing by Miami beach at 300', doing 130kts !

Day 98 ( 153.3 TT, 78.4 MET )

My visit to Colorado was awesome! It snowed right when we landed in Denver international. Had a wonderful Christmas with my family, ate a LOT of food. Came back to Florida before new years, which I now regret, there was nobody here at school, so we didn't do much flying. This was the first time I celebrated new years alone, just me and Times Square on a small TV :(

I'm now flying off my commercial maturation hours (18 hrs with an instructor before you start time building with another student). The planes brake down a lot, and during the last week alone we squawked 3 different planes in 2 days. On a flight from Key West on Friday night, I had to use my flashlight to light up the instruments because all but two bulbs were burnt out. And by the end of the flight I couldn't feel my fingers because the heaters don't work in any of the planes (I heard a rumor that the 100 hour inspections are cheaper and faster without having to maintain the heaters).

I got a kneeboard for the iPad on Christmas, and I've started to use it on long flights. It is a better tool than I expected. Not only does it replace a TON of paper maps, plates and diagrams, it's also extremely easy to change flight routing on the go. For example I filed an IFR route from Jacksonville that was changed by the flight center and was given a different route. I just found the new fix and dragged the course over it and thats it. My instructor wants an iPad now too.

Below is a quick shot of a twisting river on the way to Savannah, Georgia. Also I've attached a screen shot from ForeFlight with my recent x-country flights.

Day 78 ( 142.7 TT, 67.8 MET )

I passed the instrument check ride today! I feel like a giant rock fell off my shoulders. I don't know why I stress out over these check rides so much, sometimes I think my hair will start turning white. The ride was with Max Krull, and he is a great examiner. The oral was about 2hrs, flight about 1.5hrs. Compared to McColgan (see Day 38 below), he is what a good examiner should be. I don't feel like I got an easy pass, we covered most of the key knowledge areas, and at the same time he actually taught me a few things. On wednesday I'm flying back to Denver for Christmas, and boy I miss snow! Finally I will get to see my family and maybe even get some skiing in. Below are a few shots of my recent flights:




Above is a picture of Venice, Florida, which has water canals running between houses and entire neighborhoods - just like the real Venice in Italy!








Above are pictures of flight on top of a cloud layer and then in between two layers. Now I will move on to my time building stage, which is said to be the funnest part of this whole program.

To everyone reading this blog, Merry Christmas!

Day 67 ( 134.7 TT, 59.8 MET )

Well I'm almost done with my instrument training. Passed stage III check today. Still have to pass the end of course with Pierre (he is easily the most experienced pilot in the school, former fighter pilot and holds a PhD in aerodynamics), and then the check ride. With memories of my last check ride still fresh, I really don't look forward to it, even though I will do it with a different examiner. I really hope to finish before the 21st (I'm flying back to Denver for Christmas, can't wait), so that I can begin my time building early next year.

There are major issues with the planes right now, a lot are down for maintenance and inspections. They even tried to shut down flight operations for wednesday, so that the mechanics could "catch up". A lot of flights were canceled, including my stage check. That almost caused an uprising (most students don't like to sit at home and pay rent, while the school deals with their ancient fleet) so by noon all of the available planes were back up.

On a more positive note, today's flight added 1.5 hrs of actual flight in meteorological conditions to my logbook. These hours are hard to come by here in florida, since it's been mostly clear these past two weeks, but really windy and turbulent. Anyways, we took off in pretty gloomy conditions, it was getting ready to rain. Miami center assigned us to 5000', and we broke out of the "soup" at about 4500'. It's a different world up there. Its a perfectly calm, blue sky with the blinding sun illuminating a white carpet of clouds below. Its in moments like these that I remember why I wanted to be a pilot in the first place. Sorry, I don't have a picture to post, I was really busy navigating, but a picture wouldn't do the view justice anyway...

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.