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My Second Intro Flight( long )Hello,As you may remember, I took an introductory lesson a few weeks ago. Three major things happened:
So tonight I toook another intro lesson, with another CFI. He's one of the cheap guys - working his way up to an airline seat. By "cheap" I mean $20/hour instruction, $30 an hour airplane rental. Not only that, he didn't charge for ground instruction time. Well, I insisted on paying him for it anyway - I feel that if a person is working, he should be paid for it. I don't work for free, either. I got out from work at 5:00 and drove to the airport. This was RHV, in San Jose. Here's where I made my first mistake of the evening; I stopped to eat at a little Vietnamese restaurant. Now, I don't know nothing about Vietnamese food, so when they asked if I wanted a small, medium, or large bowl of noodle soup, I said "medium". They brought out this enormous bowl, and my heart sank. Even though I didn't finish it, I ate too much. Not only that, they had this killer chile sauce, and I cranked up the heat until I started to cry :-). Then I continued on to the airport, teary-eyed and stuffed to the gills. This was a serious lesson - 3.5 hours of instruction, 1.3 hours of flight. First we did a long and detailed preflight. I'd just gotten a mini-Mag flashlight, and it came in really useful. ( Couldn't decide whether to get the AA kind or the AAA kind in the store - figured the AAA one would be handier in the cockpit, but the larger AA one would do a better job for preflights - went with the AA one because the batteries should last longer ). It worked fine in the cockpit, too, except that it was just too damned bright - I need to get a red filter for it. And put a couple bands of Velcro around it. I had a setup for recording the leson; a micro-cassette recorder with voice-activation. And a cord that I'd made up. This cord went between my headphone and the intercom - with a third lead that went out to the tape recorder, with a divide-by-100 voltage divider inside. I put a strip of velcro up the side of the recorder's case, and a matching strip along the edge of the cord. This was for a strain relief, so that the little tiny jack in the recorder doesn't get busted. Taxiing in the dark was - how can I say it - "interesting". As in the Chinese curse. Lucky he knew where we were going, because I sure didn't! He prompted me, and I did the radio calls. Well, some of them, anyway. After doing runup, the pre-takeoff checklist, and the mag check, we took off. Then I noticed something interesting about flying at night: The whole Bay Area valley was covered in lights, but the hills were dark! Now, one of the things that bothered me on my first flight was that in the Bay Area, there really is no "horizon", at least not when you're at 2000' - it's behind the hills. But that carpet of lights formed a sort of "horizon", and attitude control was actually easier! We flew up to PAO, and landed there. The tower had already closed for the night, so it was uncontrolled. Right about then, I started to get this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach :-(. We taxied back around and took off, heading back to RHV. The bad feeling grew. We landed back at RHV. We piled out of the airplane, and he did the post-landing checks ( it was already after 10:00 ). He made a detailed entry in my new logbook, and I came home, congratulating myself for not losing that big supper. My stomach is still not quite settled down. I hadn't tried the ginger capsules - somehow it didn't seem right to pile them on over that big, hot supper. This CFI seems perfectly OK to me. We got along fine, and surely 3.5 hours of lecture is enough to get an idea of teaching style. And he's only going to stay on his day job for another couple of weeks. Only trouble is, RHV is awfully far away. I'm going to try out yet another CFI on Saturday. This guy is a tad more expensive, at $40/hour rental, plus $20/hour instruction. But PAO is much more convenient. Also, he's got a taildragger, and I have this thing about antique vehicles :-). So we'll see what happens... - Jerry |