Today another one of my instructors left for the airlines. The guy I’d been flying with the last few weeks got hired at Republic and today was our last flight. We took the 172 up and tried holds and DME arcs in the air. It was pretty bumpy today, especially over the hills, and made for a fun ride! All in all, it wasn’t much different from the sim and was pretty easy stuff. The only surprise on the flight was the little knob on the throttle fell off when I reached to adjust the power a little. Shot the ILS for 25R at LVK and said our goodbyes. He commented on how well I was doing, and chatted a bit about his hours (something like 2.5k and 180 ME total) and said I was pretty close to meeting the minimums myself! Realistically, that’s a few years off, but it was nice to hear for the first time someone mention I was closer rather than farther from the ultimate goal. Now I need to find a new instructor. I met one of my old instructors at the flight school last week, he is flying the CRJ for Skywest now and is instructing at the school a couple days a week. I’m hoping I can work into his schedule and fly with him again, and hopefully hear a few stories about airline flying! I’ll have to wait at least a week until he’s back from a vacation, darn.

 Till next time..

So I haven’t updated in awhile but here’s a recap of the events over the last few weeks. I started flying a Cessna 172P which is a little nicer than the other plane I was flying. The major difference is it has a GPS!? I didn’t fool around with it much but it was cool looking over and seeing where I was on a map. The best part was it told me which radial I was on for a certain VOR, which was nice because we were practicing VOR navigation. But really, who needs it when ya got steam gauges? Anyways, the instructor gave me the OK to bring the camera aboard next time we go up, which hasn’t happened yet, more on that later..

Next time around we hit the simulator. Instructor walks in, “Ah, holds… Fun!” After about 45 minutes of drawing holds on a whiteboard with various scenarios we moved over to the flight simulator (which is basically a yoke, a communications panel, and a couple monitors). I tooled around the area entering holds in various ways and trying to maintain altitude, sorta, because the yoke is either too sensitive or unresponsive. The same input could put you in a 1000 FPM decent or have no effect at all. Go Figure.

Next round in the simulator will include more holds and some DME arcs. It was supposed to be Tuesday, then today, now who knows. My instructor got an interview somewhere, and now he’s stuck in Chicago. So I’m waiting to see when I can get back in and continue.

More soon (hopefully)!