Posted by Kevin, on November 30th, 2004 Holy crap! Flight test is scheduled for tomorrow! I’m freaking out a little bit here… Must make sure to get everything done tonight that I can, and then get all the variable stuff done nice and early tomorrow so I’m ready. I may have to take the day off work. [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 29th, 2004 Went flying with Brad again today. Talk about a beautiful day! The club still hasen’t got their new fuel tank straightened out so that caused a bit of a delay, but they got the esso truck to come down and fill us up, so it was all good. Started the flight with a soft field takeoff and then went out to the practice area for…practice – how about that! Started with a little slow flight, followed by a few stalls, and then a forced approach and also a precautionary approach. After that we did a couple of spiral dives and then a forward slip before heading back in. For the landing, it was a short field landing. [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 29th, 2004 They said that ITMS would be available in Canada in November. Well it’s November 29th at 1615…that only leaves them a day plus a few hours to meet their deadline. I, for one, hope they make it – but like I said to Dave earlier today, I’m not holding my breath. [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 29th, 2004 Friday was a beautiful day! I couldn’t believe it when I woke up and looked out the window. Clear blue skies and a light wind. I thought to myself, I’m definitely getting my cross country in today! Unfortunately, Friday was also a somewhat crazy day at work. I was told the night before, just before I left work, that I had to do some regulatory testing on Monday at a location on River Road. I was also told that I needed to get the equipment gathered together and tested before it was shipped out to the location on Friday afternoon. That meant a lot of running around and no time to do my pre-flight planning that was necessary. Not good. I did manage to get some of it done, but not everything. In the end, turns out that the testing got pushed back to Thursday so I was able to leave without any worries. Whew! [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 20th, 2004 Went out with Brad on Friday afternoon to finish up my required instrument time and to practice forced and precautionary approaches. To be honest, the first one of each that I did, sucked big time! Not too sure what was going on, I guess I was trying to rush through them or something. I was being very indecisive when it came to picking a field too. It was somewhat frustrating. After the brutal time I had with the forced and precautionaries, we did a diversion. I had to get from Fitzroy Harbour to Wilson’s Corners. That actually went quite well, I found Wilson’s Corners without too much trouble, but it did take me quite a while to figure out what heading to fly. The other thing I didn’t consider was the MOCA for when we got over the Gatineau Hills. [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 14th, 2004 Went out and bought a new 120 GB HD on Tuesday. Well actually, I didn’t go anywhere, I ordered it from Tiger Direct. Talk about a sweet deal, I got the HD for $59.97 (after a $20 mail in rebate). That’s like $0.50 a gig! JK came over last night and we installed the new HD in my server. I decided that I’d just do a fresh install on the server and then restore the backups I made of my databases. It worked out really well! Anyways, now I’ve got more harddrive space than I know what to do with. I was thinking of moving all my music to the server but I’m not sure if that is a good idea or not. [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 12th, 2004 …and yet I didn’t go flying this morning as scheduled. Why? Cause both 150s were left outside last night and were covered with frost. Why? Cause there was a big honkin’ trailer in the hangar taking up most of the space. Why? Cause apparently it was very important to keep VGT nice and toasty warm even though it’s got NO WINGS and is not used for training. Why the hell couldn’t that huge ass trailer have been left outside so that a few planes could have been stored inside overnight? As you can maybe tell, I’m a little on the pissed off side of life right now. I got up at 6:30 this morning (after going to bed after 1 am) so that I could be at the club on time for my 8 am booking only to find this out. ARGH! [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 10th, 2004 As I mentioned in a previous post, I need to get some more instrument time done before I’m able to do my flight test. I had hoped to get that done last night, but alas, it was not to be. More on that later. Since 150s are in short supply these days, Brad suggested I book some time on one of the 172s that the club has. His reasoning was that I was going to have to get checked out on them eventually anyways, so why not start now. Good point. I showed up at the club for my 12:30 booking. It was a bit windy today and man was it ever cold! In reality it wasn’t that cold, I’m just not used to it yet. The walk around was not comfortable, but I got it done with no problems. Checking the stall horn on a 172 is somewhat challenging. [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 7th, 2004 Went up for a pre-flight test with Brad yesterday. We had previously done the ground portion of the test, so it was just the flying part. I didn’t think we’d actually be going because it was quite windy out. Brad said that if I could handle it, he could…so we ended up going. The good news is that I didn’t ‘fail’ anything, but apparently I came close on a couple of things. I wont get into the details (at least not right now) but after it was over, Brad told me how I did and what I should work on before the flight test. We’re going to go up a couple of more times before the real flight test. I also need to get some more hood time, I need another couple of hours! [...]
Posted by Kevin, on November 4th, 2004 Left work a bit early on Wednesday so I could do a little flying. Got to the club just before 2 and was hoping the winds had died down a bit like they were supposed to. The METAR was saying that they were gusting up to 15 knots (the limit for solo flight for a student) but when we listened to the ATIS, it was saying only 10 knots. Brad gave me a list of things to work on while I was out in the practice area. Specifically – slow flight, power off stalls, power on stalls, steep turns and forward slips. I was finding the hardest thing for me to do was the damn HASEL check before every exercise. [...]
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