My Flight Journal

Wednesday, May 21, 2003 6:01am

One good thing about the school I picked is that they're on the north side of the airport. From there, you can take off east, west or south without having to taxi far at all.

I managed to get 0.5 hours in last night even though the ceilings were around 2,000 ft. We had to wait on one plane to land before we could take off, and we didn't have to wait at all to get into the pattern to land (there was one guy a few mins behind us and no one in front). Taxi and hold times were not a factor. There was a pretty stiff crosswind so I didn't get to take a shot at takeoff or landing myself. We just did simple turns and some slow flight. Wanted to do stalls but didn't - will wait till we can do them a little higher than 1500 ft. My CFI said we can do spins too.

That 172P has seen better days. All the avionics are 20+ years old (or so I think), and looks like it hasn't been painted (or even washed) in the last 10. It's missing 3 or 4 screws on various cover plates. The interior actually isn't bad. The stall warning makes a low whistle from around 65kts on down, which is kinda annoying. I'm debating switching to the R, but I'd really rather train on a kite with carbs than one without.

Looking at the weather, it appears that today is going to be the only decent weather day for the rest of the week, so I'm going to go back out tonight. A three-day weekend and the weather looks crappy.

For what it's worth, my instructor said I was a natural. Said he expects I'll be soloing and taking my checkride at the minimum required hours. Course, that was after only 0.5 so I'm taking it with a grain a salt -- oh, and about 1.5 hrs of ground school where we covered about 10 hrs of material because I knew it all already.