Too far ahead.

Every pilot will tell you that the trick to successful flying is to stay ahead of the plane. There’s an old saying that tells us “never put the plane somewhere your mind wasn’t 5 minutes ago”.

I’m going to tell you that it is, in fact, possible to be too far ahead of the plane.  Today’s flight, for example, the plan being that I’d do the obligatory couple of circuits to regain my currency and then head off to the practice area.

Well my circuits were bad because, quite simply, my brain was already out at the practice area.  As we took off and climbed like the proverbial rocket, I made my crosswind turn nice and early as ATC had requested me to.  I kept up the best rate of climb and both Bob and I marvelled at the performance of the plane in this cool weather.

“Watch your altitude,” Bob advised. I looked at him, then my altimeter, then him again. Momentarily confused, sure I’m just passing through 1300ft, what’s the issue?

“Oh Crap I’m staying in the circuit, aren’t I? D’oh!!!!”  Quickly I lose the excess height.

Mentally I was already heading off to Claremont, planning out my flight to the east. Oops! As I said before it is possible to be too far ahead. I was a whole flight in front of myself!

My name is WMAP and I’m a flight-aholic

It has been one month since my last flight.

Yes, seriously it has been that long since the weather cooperated enough for me to consider getting airborne.   You may be able to tell from my blog posts that I’m getting just a little tired of the cold, snow and cloud. 

Starting on about Wednesday each week I dutifully start stalking the long term forecast, scoping out which day of the weekend looks the most promising (or least terrible) for flying.  As we get closer to the day I start stalking TAFS and GFAs to get a handle on the likely hood of me getting into a plane. 

 Frustratingly the weather likes to toy with me. Right up until the night before the forecasts like to look marginal, usually with lowish ceilings. Mentally I’ve been finding this hard to deal with. As I mentioned, I really am addicted to this and after literally weeks of having my hopes raised and dashed, raised and dashed, I was starting to get a little disillusioned with the whole process. I couldn’t seem to catch a break and there didn’t seem to be an end in sight.

To be honest, I got so tired of the constant am I? aren’t I ? aspects to this. My flying morning routine became a litany of “going through the motions”, get up, check weather, phone Flight Services, text Bob, procrastinate over the decision before inevitably deciding not to go.

This week didn’t look to be any different, the forecasts showing marginal ceilings, no good for upper airwork that really I’d already resigned myself to the groundhog day described above. To protect my sanity, I'd pretty much convinced myself that we'd either call a no-go or at the most I'd get to fling it around a few circuits.

And that is how I found myself woefully unprepared mentally for the flight I was actually about to embark on.

You can tell I’m not flying much.

This month’s credit card statement is barely breaking three figures. 

All in the timing

For whatever reason Bob always sends me my flight times in UTC or Zulu time. So I’ll get a text saying “plane booked at 14:30Z” Then I’ll have to do the quick mental math to figure that out in local time.

I have a suspicion that this started as some kind of joke between us, I don’t recall how exactly. Now, I think Bob does it to try and be funny and it is, albeit in a silly kind of way. Occasionally though my mind does stupid things like take 7 hours off instead of 5 (usually when trying to covert from 24h clock as well as UTC). Leading me to curse out loud “you want me to be there at what time?*

Occasionally it leads to potential misunderstandings, such as last week when we (in what turned out to be a futile gesture) postponed our flight in hopes of higher ceilings, where Bob felt the need to confirm that I understood 18:00 to be 18:00Z and not local.

Seeing as its dark outside by 18:00, I got the general idea!

* I usually tend to be Bob's first student of the day. I don't know if this is because I live locally and can make it early or if I'm the only student he has that is capable of dragging their ass out of bed at the weekend!

Shall we try again?

Same crappy weather this week (actually slightly worse, yesterday’s snow ended up at about 25 cm), same slightly dicey forecast for the weekend (one day out of the question, the other marginal, maybe)

So the plan is the same, right down to the time of the plane booking, 9:30 a.m. I’m hoping that the outcome will be slightly different though.

It has been a stupid amount of time since my last flight. 

It’s snow fun.

Title’s meant to be a sad word play thingy. 

Today is certainly no fun. I’m at work, having made it in relatively unscathed despite the steady snowfall (actually it wasn’t too bad, just enough on the ground so that your boots dig in rather than slipping), I’m now watching the snowfall get heavier and heavier.

The only thing worse than knowing you’ve got to trudge through fallen snow to get to work is knowing you’ve got to fight your way through even more to get home.

Still on the ground.

Low ceilings = p!ssed off WMAP. I’m probably going to be done with the blogging until I get airborne again. 

I have truly run out of things to post.

Have I mentioned how much I hate this winter?