A mint day for flying...

Today was one of those days that everyone thinks is mint for flying.  Warm and sunny with great visibility and almost nil wind.  Truth is, it's actually not that mint because when the air is warmer, it's less dense and the aircraft can't make as much power and when there's no headwind, you need more runway to take off and land.

In any event, I went flying today.  And I did it in a dress (I am wearing a dress everyday in October to help raise ovarian cancer awareness in conjunction with Frocktober). 

The lesson was just plain circuits and was much needed after 3 weeks out of the left seat.  Before we got off the ground, I had already made two blunders...starting the aircraft with the mixture lean instead of full rich and doing a dead-cut check instead of a plain magnetos check...nothing terrible but "d'oh" moments to say the least. 

The other thing that challenged me today was flying the opposite circuit to what I'm used to.  I was taking off and landing on 07 today instead of 25...I only muddled the radio calls once.  The good thing about 07 is that you're coming into land over a nice flat stretch and you have a lot more time to line up with the centre of the runway.  My first approach was a go-around, but after that I did several decent landings.  I was conscious of flying the plane to the ground rather than flaring and waiting for it to land itself (it never does so gracefully).  None of the landings today were coincidences, they were all me - my husband, who was watching, asked if I had done the landings because they looked really good.  Excellent.

Well, best get back outside and finish soaking up another beautiful day...

Lesson 6 - Revision, Circuits, and Really Bad Taxiing

There are days when you just have to laugh at yourself.  Today was one of those days.

Perhaps it's the edges of this cold hanging on or the 2 week gap since my last flight, but I was having an "off" flying day.  Feeling a bit fuzzy around the edges and not altogether awesome.  That said, I did do a spectacularly perfect level medium turn...

Circuits are the bane of most student pilot's existence for some time and I can see why.  You're doing the same loop over and over and over again.  Doug, my instructor, said circuits made him lose the will to live (figuratively, obviously). I am not at this point yet - circuits still seem reasonable and I was happy with my progress in the circuit today...

The bane of my existence is taxiing.  And the highlight (or lowlight, depending on how you look at things) of today's lesson  was a taxiing incident.  An incident that was not dramatic or scary, but just embarrassing.  Today I taxied off the side of the runway into the soft, wet grass.  I had to shut down the plane, at approximately the midpoint of the runway, and get out and push it back onto the seal.  Not only did I push, Doug pushed, and two of the engineers from a nearby hangar came out to help us too...I wasn't so stuck that I needed all of us, but I guess it's good to know the help is there if I ever am.  

As we got back into the plane and started everything back up as quickly as possible so as to remove ourselves from smack-dab in the middle of the runway, Doug and I were laughing.  There wasn't really anything else to do - no one was hurt, the plane wasn't broken, and there were no impending landings.  I suppressed a giggle as I made my radio call and proceeded to taxi in a perfectly straight line down to the turning bay...

So today I made a mistake.  I took responsibility for it and tried to learn from it.  And I laughed...