Constantly moving the goalposts.

I have a secret grudging admiration for Bob sometimes. He sure as hell knows how to keep a girl on her toes. Seriously a month or two ago I would have quite happily killed him without a second glance if he’d pulled the kind of stunts on me that he does now.

During today’s lesson I swear I could  actually hear his thought processes.  “Hmm, WMAP seems to be coping with all the stuff I’ve thrown at her so far. I mean she is still flying the plane rather than being curled up in a ball and whimpering uncontrollably, I’d better throw something else at her before she gets too comfortable. I know, what about flying her through a control zone she’s never experienced before, that’ll be fun. I can get her to have to unfold her chart and look up frequencies and speak to a tower she’s never dealt with. That’ll be good for a laugh.”

 You get the picture. Bob calls them “scenarios”, as in “what would happen if….” I call them “let’s throw some random crud at WMAP and see what happens”

I’m seriously torn between intense frustration and overwhelming pride. I get so frustrated because I spend so much time preparing  for each lesson's flight, thinking about what we did last time and where I came up short & what I need to fix for next time. And then Bob throws this stuff at me that he concocts from nowhere. I just can’t keep up with him. I try to anticipate what he might throw at me, but he’s obviously a lot more creative than I am. The pride comes from the fact that most of the time I do manage to muddle my way through it. It’s a really fine line between overwhelming me and bolstering my confidence. Bob just seems to be able to skirt the right side of it each time. When I’m in the air I’m constantly cursing him (and I make no bones about this. I’m very vocal in my dislike for unfamiliar situations) but when I have a chance to reflect I’m thinking “how the hell did you manage to get me to do that?”

Especially when he pulls the “I’m going to conveniently ignore your loudly expressed dislike and just make you fly” crap.

Today he decided that we were going to get caught in some “fog coming in off the lake” and not be able to follow our normal route back from the practice area. He got me to look at the chart and plan a landing at Buttonville. First question, how are you going to get there? I took a quick look and figured that the highway took me straight there. Next points; where are you? So how do you find the highway? A couple of minutes of thought told me, it didn’t matter where I was , all the north/south roads I could see eventually terminated at the highway. All I needed to do was follow one south, it didn’t actually matter which one.

Bob seemed relatively content with my line of reasoning because he saw fit to help me figure out the radios and prompt me with the position calls etc. Ok I was a little behind the plane but no more so than anyone being thrust into an unexpected situation.  For someone who has never made a “transiting your zone, please let me through” call before I coped pretty well. Next time I’ll have a much better idea of what to do.

Which of course is of no use to me whatsoever because next time Bob’ll have something even more dastardly planned and I’ll be back to making it up on the fly (pun intended!)