Since passing my flight test way back on December 6th, I haven’t been flying. It was a combination of a lot of things – weather, Christmas, other committments, but mostly it was because I’m out of money. :)
Luckily, I have some pretty fantastic friends who all gave me money for my birthday so I could afford to go flying again. You guys are the best!
The club has a rule that in order to be ‘current’ you have to have flown in the past 30 days. If you go past that then you need to go up with an instructor to renew your currency. Actually it’s 30 days until you have 100 hours of PIC time and then 60 days after that. I’m obviously in the less than 100 hours of PIC category so…
I booked a 172 (PMR) and Brad for Sunday morning. When I woke up, I looked out the window to see a beautiful blue sky. On my drive to the club I noticed that it was quite windy and wondered if we’d end up going or not. When I got to the club I checked the weather and the winds were blowing at 15 knots…not that bad actually.
I was really cursing the cold while I did my walk around, let me tell you that. It was only -23 or so, but the wind was obviously making it worse. Soon enough though, we were inside the plane, on our way to the runway. As I mentioned, it was a 15 knots wind, what I didn’t mentioned was that it was nearly 90 degrees to the runway! And this was my first takeoff in over a month and a half, in a 172 no less. Actually it turned out ok.
We headed out to the practice area and played around a bit. Brad got me to do a couple of steep turns, a forward slip and then a couple of stalls. He had a tour booked at 11 so after that we headed back in.
Now I had to pull off a nice cross wind landing, but the winds had died off a bit, thankfully. The landing actually went quite well, I was happy with it.
I made a plan with Brad that I would do a couple of bookings a month with him up until after the wedding (money is tight remember) to work on my night rating. Looking forward to that!
Anyways, I’m current again, so now I need to make sure I get up with Amy really soon so that I can start taking other people up.