7 months later...
April 1, 2005. Seven months since the last time I flew. Weather, the holidays, etc., stopped me from flying. Then I was not current, so that kept me from it for a while. But today I went back up with Donn and Jeff (who was also out of currency).
So we get there, and start pre-flighting the plane. Then Donn gets there and says last time he flew this plane one of the magnetos was bad. This was, of course, when I was about halfway through preflighting it. So we moved our stuff to the other 172 there, and Jeff started pre-flighting it. I went in to the office to switch the reservation.
Of course the other 172 was signed out already, so we couldn't take it. The guy running the office said they had checked out the magneto and it was ok, so I went back out to let Donn and Jeff know. Jeff had, naturally, just finished that preflight. We moved our stuff back, planning on checking out the magneto ourselves before we took off.
I finished my aborted preflight, and we climed in to take off. That's when we noticed this plane only had 2 intercoms, so the guy in the back seat couldn't listen in. That makes it real exciting to be in the back seat! We managed, but Jeff couldn't hear us.
We started off by doing some stalls, which I hadn't done in forever. When I stall a plane, it takes forever to do, I think because I don't pull back far enough on the wheel, but evenutally it stalls. We did 4 or 5 of them, and headed over to Franklin for landing practice. Other than Jeff sitting in the back with no way to know what we were going to do next, it was fine.
After a few landings, we switched so Jeff could fly and I was sitting deaf in the back seat. He started off with a handful of landings and then took off the other way. I assumed we were leaving the area, when suddenly Jeff started the landing procedure to land again, in a right hand pattern that was kind of far out. I wasn't sure what he was doing, but it looked pretty sloppy to me.
It turned out Donn had pulled the power in a simulated engine-out, and said to Jeff "What are you gonna do?" So he was doing a practice no-engine thing, and did it well. If it'd been a planned landing, it would have sucked, but for an engine out practice, it was pretty good.
We headed on back toward Rancho and Jeff had his turn to do stalls. He pulls the nose up higher than I think I do, so he stalled faster. We talked about it later, we don't understand how anyone can stall a 172, you get a half hour's worth of notice that it's going to stall. But then again, we were doing it on purpose, it wasn't sneaking up on us.
He did a few more landings at Rancho, and we packed the plane up. I'm going up again at the end of the month to finish my WINGS Level 2 training (and get signed off on my BFR again). Then I need 3 or 4 more hours before I can start 182 (high-performance aircraft) training. That probably won't actually happen until next summer, but it'll be cool!
Email me!
Back to Flying Main Page
Back to Home Page