Monday, January 12, 2009

Ho hum ...

Sadly, I don't have much to report these days. Mother nature has been very unkind the last couple of Sundays and I still haven't slotted a weekday for flying. With the days getting a bit longer I may have some more flexibility.

Dick has put me with another instructor, a nice fellow from Ireland whose full name I'll omit until I've asked his permission to use it. It is interesting to see how different people try to explain the art of flying. It was too windy to fly this past Sunday so I went up to the flight school to get some hours of "ground instruction." I normally do that at home with videos and books but it certainly doesn't hurt to have someone teach you either. For example, Shane drew me this diagram of airport landing rules. Looks like part Indiana Jones secret map, part ... something else.


Believe it or not, I find it as useful as anything in my textbooks or videos so far. Strange how the mind processes information.

I'm hoping to fly again this Sunday and start a second weekly lesson on Wednesdays or Thursdays. This should compel me to start watching the videos and reading the books again. I must confess that not flying has made me a bit lazy regarding the project. I never considered how extremely difficult learning a skill that is so intimately linked to the weather might be. Perhaps I've been pissing the gods off lately, it's possible.

With much of my recent downtime, I've also begun fantasizing about partial plane ownership. I tend to think a bit far ahead sometimes. There's a flyer posted at CFC that I've been tearing little contact info strips off of for the past few months. This weekend I finally began an email exchange with the guy. It's like another world. This particular plane, a Beechcraft A36 Bonanza can seat six people and cruise at 160kts (184mph) and go as high as 20,000ft. Here's a fine example of my potential future object of lust:


Hmm, maybe I should have held off on buying the car. I guess we'll see. They say a beautiful woman can motivate a man to do anything. Not sure what they say about planes.

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