PP-ASEL Checkride – Practical
Today was the day. I got out of bed and went straight to the window. It was gorgeous outside. Called for a weather briefing (to re-calculate my numbers for Vegas) and it was perfect. I got to the airport an hour early to preflight the plane (as requested) and get everything in order. Mark showed […]
PP-ASEL Checride – Oral Part II
I had rescheduled for July 1, but Mark had to change that due to work commitments. July 3 was a Saturday, so there was nobody in the office. We got right into it, and he asked me questions only in the area I had trouble with. Lots of questions. I answered them all. I begged […]
PP-ASEL Checkride – Oral
Well, today was supposed to be the day for the whole thing, but it didn’t turn out that way. I got to the airport about an hour early to make sure everything was in order. Mark Boss – the designated examiner – told me to plan a cross country from Van Nuys to Las Vegas, […]
Phase check
To give myself that extra little boost of confidence, I scheduled a simulated checkride (commonly known as a Phase Check) with a different CFI – Gene Hudson. I ended up with mixed feelings – more on that in a moment. I met Gene at his office at 9:00am, and after some small talk we got […]
Finishing up
Just time now to finish up everything that needs polishing before the checkride. Took the written exam at AV8 – a local FBO at Van Nuys. It’s all done by computer, you can go back through all your answers, mark answers to flag them for review, etc. Pretty slick. You get 2.5 hours for the […]
Long solo cross country
Today was my long solo cross country. The requirement is a solo flight of at least 150 nautical miles with landings at 3 airports and one leg of greater than 50nm. I exceeded that by plenty. The first leg (to Porterville) was over 100nm, and the whole trip was 290nm. The day started out looking […]
Second solo cross country
After a week of really lousy weather (lousy here is clouds and light rain), I got a GREAT day for another cross country – this one to Tehachapi (TSP), almost directly north of Van Nuys. Feeling very confident and having everything planned, I figured this would be a very routine flight. As with most things […]
First solo cross country
The weather finally cooperated, and I did my solo x/c to Palm Springs (PSP) today. What a great flight! Got very organized, stayed very calm. Made two minor mistakes right away. First was that I took my hand off the throttle to write down the time off, and didn’t tighten the throttle lock. By the […]
Third cross country
Closed escrow on our new house this week, and moved in over the weekend. Couldn’t fly at all since the night x/c, so I went out midday and flew around the pattern. Good warm up before our x/c to Bakersfield. This one I did pretty much all alone, with Kent just observing. Spotted all of […]
Night cross country
Decided to just go ahead and finish up the night time while we waited to schedule another day cross country. I planned a trip to Santa Barbara (SBA), using easily recognizable landmarks. Turns out that picking a lake as a checkpoint at night doesn’t work real good – they are pretty DARK. We headed out […]