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Scheduled my first solo cross country for this past Sunday. The weather person was calling for sunny and clear so naturally I was skeptical! However, the day turned out just as they predicted and I couldn’t have asked for better weather!

I had the plane booked from 2-6:30 and I had Dave booked from 12:30 to 2 so that he could check my work on my flight planning. One of the first things he asks me is what’s the deal with the rocket activity in Carp?! WTF?! Rocket Activity?! There was a NOTAM issued stating that there was rocket activity around the airport, but the thing was, it was only on the 23rd and the 28th. I should have known that, but I didn’t read the NOTAMs. D’Oh! Wont make that mistake again.
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Wrote the TC exam today at 11:30. Took me about 2 hours and 15 minutes. It was funny, when I clicked on the ‘done’ button it warned me that I still had time left and asked if I was sure if I wanted to submit my answers.

Here are my results:

Overall Assessment: 90.8%

Air Law: 89.5%
Navigation: 100%
Meterology: 93.1%
Aeuonautics – General Knowledge: 83.3%

Not too bad, although I wasn’t too happy with my General Knowledge mark.

Things I got wrong:

- control input when taxiing (quartering headwind – neutral elevator, not down elevator)
- decoding a GFA (not sure what I got wrong)
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Went up with Andrew yesterday afternoon to do my diversions lesson. It was a good time. We headed east of the airport (where I’ve never flown before) and went from little town to little town. On take off we even got to pick our heading and stick with it without getting vectored all over the place. Kind of crazy.

I can’t remember the names of the little towns we flew over right now, but they are all circled on my map. The first ‘diversion’ we did at an altitude of around 1500 feet (ASL). The next one was at around 1200 feet, and the last one was at around 800 feet (around 500 feet AGL)! As you get lower, things get more difficult.
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Last Friday I had an opportunity to attend a seminar put on by The Ottawa Flying Club. The speaker for the seminar was Bill Gadzos who is an Air Traffic Controller here in Ottawa. Bill also happens to be a flight test examiner, and therefore a good guy to know! ;)

Bill started out by introducing himself and telling us a bit of his background. Turns out he used to teach at the club and in fact taught a bunch of the current instructors! This is definitely a good thing. If he taught them, they they should be teaching us what he wants to see for the test right?
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My ground school final exam was last night. Out of a class of about 16, there were only 2 of us who ended up writing the exam…how crazy is that! I was really surprised to not see the two Peters who were in my class.

Actually, there were a total of 5 people who showed up, but by the end of it, there were only 2 of us. One guy decided before it even started that he wasn’t going to do it that night and would wait until the final for the Tuesday/Thursday course. Another guy started writing it but quit about 30 minutes into it. Two other guys showed up late and neither of them ended up writing it either, I think one of them didn’t have enough flight time, not sure about the other.
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Well after a long wait, Sunday was the day that I finally got to do my cross country to Kingston. Unfortunately Saturday was the day of Shelley’s wedding which meant I wasn’t in tip top shape on Sunday, but I survived.

I actually checked the weather earlier in the day and it wasn’t looking good. I went to the club anyways, thinking that I would just end up doing some flying around Ottawa. Just before two, Brad tells me that we’re going to Kingston. That meant I was way behind on my flight planning. Oops.

I took about an hour to complete the variable part of the flight plan and then actually file the flight plan. We ended up heading out at around 15:40 or so. It took us 1.4 hours to get down there. I learned a lot on the trip down, mostly that I was rusty again after more than 2 weeks since my last flight. I was having trouble holding my altitude and less troulbe holding my heading. I must have done ok though since we reached Kingston around about the time we expected to.
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So I was sitting at breakfast on Sunday, the day after JK’s wedding and my cell phone rings. It was the flying club telling me that my booking on Monday was cancelled. Something about trying to save hours.

That doesn’t make much sense to me, unless there wasn’t even enough hours for me to complete the trip to Kingston and back. What makes someone else’s booking more important than mine?!

After stewing on it a while, I called Brad to ask him what was up. He was just as frustrated as me, you see he doesn’t get paid unless he’s flying, and if Wayne is going around cancelling his bookings, well…
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