Friday, June 09, 2006
CFI Checkride
woohoo just failed my CFI checkride. Got through the 5 hour oral exam with not much problem. The weather was god awful today so I was just going to do the landings and discontinue the ride so I could do the higher altitude maneuvers another day. Ended up busting on the emergency landing because I forgot to check the fuel selector. So not too pleased with myself but then again almost no one passes their first time and even on the second time you dont see a lot.
Got to go to the bank and do some stuff then spend the rest of the weekend with Alison so yay.
Monday, April 10, 2006
New Seminole and my day
Today was a fun day. I was supposed to go to the airport at 10:30 to meet Prof. Weber and do my tryout for the IFR Simulator event for flight team. When I got there, I found out he and Mr. Palcho were supposed to take the brand new Piper Seminole, N31246 out for a spin to work on the flight training checklist. I said half-jokingly that he could make it up to me by letting me ride backseat. He brought it up to Tim and he said yes! Awesome! It was a pretty quick flight out to Port Meadville (About 60nm away, just north of Y-Town) and back. The new plane’s pretty cool, with a nice dual Garmin 430 GPS system and the fact that the engines actually start on it. They also said that once my instructor gets checked out in it (tomorrow) I can take it to fly off the last 2.8 hours I had left over from my multi class! Totally can’t wait, I’ll probably take it out to Rochester NY or something.
When I got home I was playing around with google and looking up the flight team website with it. Somehow ended up on Wikipedia and found some vandalism on the Entries for Kent State and the Kent State Shootings. This kinda hurt deep down that someone would take a tragic event like that and smear “So-and-so is very gay” all over it. Did my civic duty and reverted it back to before their edits. Made me mad a little. Otherwise I’m at work now and about to go to the airport to torture AK-47 with a tough NDB approach, hold, and localizer approach at CCR airport in California. Then it’s E6-B tryout time at 7:30pm-9 and finally get to go home and study for a test in Flight Instructor Theory at 7:30am tomorrow.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Multi Engine (Expanded)
My multi-engine checkride was scheduled for Thursday, March 16th. As always, I never get to do the checkride when it’s first scheduled. I’ve been flying a Piper Seminole (PA-44 / 180) since the start of the semester. I had 11.1 hours in the airplane by the time I took the ride. So anyways, Thursday comes by and I get to the airport. Turns out the FAA had come by and took one of the Seminoles somewhere for something (I don’t even know what). The other one was down for maintenance, so I was like “damn” and all that. I did the oral exam, which lasted for about an hour and a half and went fine. Scheduled the flight for Sunday at 9am.
Sunday 9am comes by and the clouds are pretty low. One of the requirements of the checkride is to actually shut down an engine in flight, which has to be done at a high enough altitude so that if it doesn’t restart you can glide to an airport. I needed to be able to get to 4,500ft, and the clouds didn’t let me do it. My examiner is leaving town for the week on Tuesday, March 21 so there’s not much time. Rescheduled flight for 7:30am Monday March 20.
7:30am March 20 comes and it’s the same thing. Lake Effect is causing a lot of clouds pretty low. Examiner says he can do it later in the day, like 3pm. Waited all day for the clouds to rise. About 4pm they finally start to break up and we decided to go. The ride went pretty smoothly. I was very nervous before the flight, but once I actually start flying I’m always better. I ran through the maneuvers which were okay. Then we failed the engine, which was cool and probably the last time I’ll see a stopped prop hanging out there for a while (hopefully). Then we did the VOR-A approach into KSU with a simulated failed engine all the way to the landing. After all that, we took off one more time and did a short field landing and I was done! There’s nothing more satisfying than the moment when you realize you passed a checkride. Glad to be done.
Now I can focus more on my Certified Flight Instructor work and it frees up about 3 hours in the middle of the day for me too. Woots.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Spring Break
Since I have no plans for spring break, I was wondering if anyone wanted to do anything. I was thinking maybe we could fly somewhere cool for a day or something. Also, LAN Party on one of the days (or more) to be determined. Flying wouldn’t be too expensive, especially if there are 4 of us. Anywhere people want to go? I just want to fly somewhere.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Updated Quakecon flight info
I guessed a little high on the prices of the airplanes
Piper Seminole Twin Engine @ $210/hr
6 hours one way
$1260/3 people = $420
$1260/4 people = $315
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Cessna 172RG Cutlass @ $125/hr
7 hours one way
$889/3 people = $297
$889/4 people = $223