I had a really fun flying lesson today, a tour of Bay Area airports. San Carlos, Palo Alto, San Jose, Reid-Hillview, Livermore, Hayward, and back to San Carlos. 90 miles and 7 landings in just under two hours.

Lessons have been going well. It's challenging. I skipped right over learning to land on this blog. That's a major topic and I don't quite know what to say about it, other than I'm not scared of landing anymore but have a healthy respect about how every landing is a unique challenge.

The difficulty in today's lesson, what made it so exciting, was putting together a bunch of skills and doing everything at once. Reading charts. Taking off, cruising, landing. Avoiding restricted airspace. Flying the pattern, setting up an approach from whatever weird direction I was coming from. Finding airports. Judging the weather. And juggling radios: 11 controllers, 7 ATIS. I'm proud of myself that I handled about 95% without mistakes and 100% safely. Now I just have to practice for 50 more hours!

aviation
  2009-12-19 00:45 Z