Its tax day today, the day that plagues the procrastinators out there who waited until the last minute and the day that accountants all around the country count down to for two and a half months in hopes of getting their lives back.

This semester is over two weeks from tomorrow. I’ve got a white dry erase board over my shoulder that contains my do-list for the next two weeks and it is PACKED with stuff. Reading, problems, projects, galore through to the end. The beauty of the thing is that I’ve worked so hard this semester that I am currently standing with straight A’s in all classes. Thus, even though its difficult to find any white space on my marker board, I could more and less erase everything right now and go fart and eat cheese puffs for the next two weeks and come up shining in the end.

Flying – since this is sort of a flying blog – is going as well as I can hope for considering my time demands. I’ve flown nearly fifty hours in the last four months. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the speed at which I was logging flight time last year, but considering my primary purpose at present has little to do with aviation, I am satisfied at the status quo. I’ve got two active students and potentially another coming on line within a month or so. One student is ready for solo, but we’re waiting for the right weather and mindset to actually do it. The other is on lesson five and is coming along nicely. The third is a student of mine whom I flew with a couple years ago (Hey, Harry – I know you read this!!) before the airline gig whisked me away. We are going to do his BFR in a couple weeks and get the instrument written DONE and see if we can’t finish up the rating before too long after.

Today, I soloed for the first time in a long time. I believe it had been over a year since I had last flown solo. As a flight instructor – turned first officer – turned flight instructor, actually sitting in the driver’s seat is a rare privilege. I headed up today for an hour to work on some maneuvers that I hadn’t had the opportunity to work on in a long time. As a flight instructor, I know what the maneuvers should look like, I know how to critique them, troubleshoot them, etc. But can I actually fly them? I didn’t do too badly actually. My chandelle left just a bit to be desired, but it was a solid B performance. However, my turns around a point were rock solid. Slow flight, stalls, and steep turns were all good. I decided to “challenge” things up a bit and did several consecutive 360’s in a 45 degree banked steep turn while transitioning airspeed from Va to right above the stall and back again a couple times. Holding that bank angle, altitude, re-trimming, changing power, keeping the ball in the middle, all simultaneously is a workout. I enjoy flying solo once in the blue moon, but I enjoy being able to share it with others much more. However, being able to use my own skills to fly instead of merely overseeing what the student is doing is a welcome change from time to time.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Next stop – two weeks from now!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Day to Day Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.