I know, corny title. Well, after a long time and many twists and turns, I finally got to fly an airplane solo last summer. It just so happened that my 86 year old mom from Prospect Harbor Maine was here in Minnesota visiting the kids, and she does some commentary on the video. The other voice, and recorder, is Jackie of Valters Aviation, my long suffering flight instructor. I'm wearing a yucky old tee shirt, because the "tradition" is that the back of your shirt gets cut off when you first solo, kind of a right of passage for flying students.
The plane I was flying is called a Gobosh 700s. Gobosh is a pretentious title that stands for "go big or stay home. But, the plane is equipped in a way that works really well for me - old fashioned gauges instead of fancy electronics. Works for my old engineering brain, and my less-than-perfect eyesight.
The typical solo flight comes after you've fulfilled the training requirements. Then, on 'solo day', you fly around the traffic pattern with your instructor until she thinks your takeoffs and landings are OK. Then you taxi back to the flight school, the instructor gets out of the plane, and you do 3 takeoffs and landings on your own.
While I was waiting to take off on my first solo takeoff, I'm watching the traffic, and it turns out that two planes were trying to land at about the same time on different runways. The runways cross, so this is clearly a bad thing. So I get on the radio and say "We have two planes landing on runways 22 and 32 at the same time." And the pilot landing on runway 32 aborts and goes around. I was glad I was able to pay attention even while nervous over my first solo.
6 comments:
This is interesting, how long had you been in flight school?
Well, if you add up all the hours it was about 60. But the first 45 were when I was trying to get a different kind of pilot's license. So I had about 12 hours in that plane when I soloed. If you want it in years, well I started 2 years ago, then went back to it early this summer. Got my sport pilot's license in September.
My dad had a pilot's license when he served in the Air force some 30 years ago. Anyway, congrats on your license!
Thanks! Did your dad ever fly after he left the air force? My dad didn't fly, but he helped design aircraft engines. I never thought getting a pilot's license was a possibility when I was young, but better late than never.
Woo hoo! That is so exciting! Were you scared?
The first takeoff and landing I wasn't scared. The second time I tried to take off, it seemed like the plane wanted to run off the runway, and that was scary. With such a small plane, having just one person in it unbalances it a little, and it took me a couple of takeoff tries to figure out how to handle that. My flight instructor talked to me about it over the radio. The second landing was a little bouncy. The third one was nice and smooth. Still, I was glad to get out of the plane at the end.
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