Warmin' the bench ...

I was a good boy last night. Didn't drink too much and got plenty of sleep. I even showed up on time to flight school. Unfortunately the winds were too strong for us to fly (15kts). Too bad. I was looking forward to my first cross country flight and had reviewed the relevant material last night. I was down and ready to be the big pimp in the sky.

Instead, I sat with Shane as he gave me a bit of a private lesson on the different types of airspaces. The land above the ground is strictly controlled and carefully partitioned. There are entire sets of rules for every class of space (A through G). Here's an aeronautical chart of the DC area I bought at the school today. Thankfully, my time spent as a boyscout and video gamer have left me with pretty decent map reading skills. I don't play games anymore but I do still like maps. Charlottesville airport is the blue diamond in the lower left hand corner of the map. Dulles lies within the larger ring towards the center. Lots of rules, regulations, map icons and legends for me to learn.


It all works out for the best anyhow. The C'ville plague has been making its way through friends and colleagues lately. I've had it twice already and have been fighting off the remnants of round three recently. Pseudofed, I'm finding, alters my mental state more than I recall it doing in the past. So despite my efforts to be bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to go, my physiology wouldn't have been at 100% regardless.

The weather has been spectacular here this weekend with temperatures in the sixties. So yesterday I dusted off "macchina due." I did once give it a name, "Siu Long," which means "Little Dragon." When I first got the bike, I found that it felt almost serpentine. Similarly, being a decent sized v-twin, it had a growl that would become somewhat ferocious at higher rpms. I go back and forth on the gender of this machine. Who knows why. I'm actually somewhat enamored with the whole notion of dragons. Not so much in the new age bookstore, kitchen magnet collecting, glittery t-shirt, grown up kid who still plays dungeons and dragons kind of way. Rather, I'm interested in the history of the beast and its relationship to serpentine energy, our ancestral history that we all carry in our spines, the primitive brain, cycles, cyclical movement, sine waves, seasons, periodicity, things along those lines. So I appreciate dragons as more of a concept or allegory.

I had an interesting experience taking the bike in for inspection. She hadn't been since last September. Getting a motorcycle inspected in Charlottesville is one of the many perks to life in white man's paradise, meaning that it's incredibly easy. Ok, I shouldn't be so harsh. The reason it's so easy to to do has really very little to do with "white men" in any pejorative sense. It has much more to do with a very nice fellow name Darren at Frys Springs Garage who also rides. For the past seven or eight years I've taken this and my previous bike there for inspections. Almost every time it's on a Saturday, many times after they've closed. Every time I've been in and out in less than half an hour. That type of local, good natured, friendly, kind man to man service is part of what makes Charlottesville so special. I'm writing about it a bit more at length here because, I'm sad to say, Fry Springs Garage closed yesterday for good. In a way I was proud to get my bike inspected there on their last day of service. I'm not sure if this is an economic sign of things to come or merely the end of an era. Regardless it's a bit sad.

Why bring up the notion of a motorcycle here in a blog about flying? Well, there are no hard and fast rules to this blog and even if there were, I write them. But there actually are some interesting relationships between flying and riding a motorcycle. On a bike, you have what you might call two and a half dimensions of control. Unlike in a car, you need to do more than just turn the steering wheel in order to change direction. On a bike, you lean. The amount of lean varies on your speed, angle and a few other factors. Getting turns right on a bike takes quite a bit of practice. Leaning the bike is somewhat like titling the wings and pressing hard on the handlebars very much like keeping rudder pressure. One huge difference here is that there's no evil little ball. Instead, there's you and the road, which you really don't want to hit.

So as I sit home warming my chair this weekend I get to reflect on things like this and lay out a road map for my next few lessons. The focus in coming weeks will be about flying out to Louisa, perfecting my skills on the radio, takeoff, and landing ... all on the road to my first solo flight. As I went through some of my textbook last night I was reminded of a syllabus given to me in an intro to Western Philosophy course when I was at Cornell. The professor had set the reading schedule so that we'd have finished all the readings mid way through the class. That way, we could begin re-reading the more difficult material for the second time while we talked about it together as a group. I've always wondered how many actually did that. Sadly I didn't.

My textbook doesn't always line up sequence wise with what I've been practicing with my flight instructors. So I've been jumping around a bit in the material. Perhaps the best course of action is to forge through all the chapters then review as needed later. I can definitely see how in learning to fly there is more of an imperative to go through material over and over. The more I learn this art, the more I see how much more there is still to know.