Escaped rodent

It may be time to do something about my desk at work.

It’s just taken me 5 minutes to locate my mouse.

I still haven’t worked up the courage to go looking for my keys

Tipping the scales

My flying is a fine blend of fear and desperation to do well. For all kinds of reasons, once I set out to do something, I want to do it well. Good enough rarely is for me.

I’m balancing the genuine fear of flying with the fear of failure.  Problem is, there is rarely such a thing as a perfect flight. I’m always left with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. I can’t decide what’s worse solo flying or having Bob on board. When Bob’s there the debrief goes a lot more smoothly because he’s always seeing positives that I don’t, little things that I do well that I don’t even notice anymore. But, with the instructor comes added pressures. I care what people think. I care about the impression I leave. I would love to have a flight where I genuinely impress Bob, where I get the stuff right, where I don’t swear and curse and throw my hands up in frustration.  One where I know what I’m doing, where I don’t get snippy with him when he’s trying to help.

It’s not happened yet.

My desperation to do well, to progress can help sometimes. It’s what got me out to the practice area solo, despite that feeling in the pit of my stomach. The desire outweighed the fear.

I’m not quite at that point with my cross country yet. I mean I want to do it, I know that the feeling I’ll get when I land after finally completing that sucker will probably keep me airborne for weeks after. But at the moment the scales are just tipping the wrong way, the fear winning slightly.

I have a dual flight with Bob coming up this weekend, possibly final prep before the big one. I just know that he’s going to throw whatever he can my way, probably everything short of a zombie apocalypse. I want to get it right because I want to tip the scales back the other way.

I’m not all that hopeful though. We’ll see how it goes I guess.

Insanely jealous

I came back from my weekend away to some exciting news. D of Utah flight fame has decided, presumably on a whim, to set off on an epic flying adventure!

D is like many former PPL students from our little corner of the flying world and hasn’t really ventured much further afield than Muskoka. Well he plans to change that by heading down to sunny Florida.

I am insanely jealous, not just because he’s heading down to Florida at a time of year when the first snows are starting to hit, not just because he’s setting off on an epic 6 day voyage to places unknown. It’s his attitude I’m jealous of.

D is so….. laid back is the wrong word I feel but I’m lacking a better one at the moment. He is the polar opposite of me. He knows he’s bitten off an epic task. He knows it’s daunting and yet somehow he knows he’ll manage.

All of it at a time where I’m pathetically obsessing over stupid details about my tiny in comparison cross country flight where I’m not even leaving the one side of my chart. During my visit to D’s lab today our gaze kept wandering to the pile of charts and directories that had just arrived on his desk. Our conversation pausing briefly as we contemplated the mammoth task he’s about to embark on.

I think I counted 4 charts, his route covering them all, front and back. And he’s doing this solo. No co-pilot, no help with the navigation. D, ever the optimist, pointed out that the lack of an occupant for the front seat at least means he has plenty of “desk” space for this numerous charts.

I need to be around more people like this, people who are intimidated by the task in hand but go ahead and do it anyway.

As a parting remark D had one more piece of advice for me (he doesn’t seem to mind my inane ramblings about my flight failings), something I think Bob has been trying to tell me for a while now. I may be paraphrasing slightly but:

“No one ever learned to fly because they dreamed of doing circuits!”

 

Good weekend for a break

I took a break this weekend, not just from flying but from Toronto in general. Don’t get me wrong I love this city but just occasionally it all gets a little too much.

When this happens RTH and I plan to get the hell out of Dodge for a while and head somewhere different. This time it was a little place just outside Paris. That would be Paris, Ontario as opposed to its European namesake.

We rented a car, booked a room in a small out of the way B and B and headed off Saturday morning. I love road trips with RTH. We always take our time getting to where we want to go, driving with no real destination in mind. No maps, no charts, no GPS. The attitude being, you can’t be lost if you’re not really trying to get anywhere. Our car did actually have a GPS but we don’t have a great track record with them. Often we antagonise them to the point where they stop talking to us.

The weekend wasn’t without aviation content. For the want of anywhere better to stop, we decided to have breakfast at Brantford airport, so we got a decent view while eating our pancakes. There was a beautiful taildragger parked up while we were eating. It taxied out and left while we were there. It made me realise that in a taildragger, you have NO forward visibility whatsoever. How the hell do you keep one of them straight?

At the B and B the aviation theme continued, one of the reasons we go to bed and breakfasts is to meet new people.  You never know who you will end up chatting to over breakfast.

This time we were sitting opposite a couple from Ottawa. He is a retired aeronautical engineer in the Canadian air force. We excitedly talked Harvards and Hawks and all manner of aircraft. Pausing occasionally to explain the differences to our hosts.

It was a cruddy weekend for flying, the weather blustery and intermittently wet. But it was a good weekend to escape and recharge the batteries.

Now I can get back to thinking about my upcoming cross country.

 

It’s the little things….

….that bother me sometimes. I’m currently mulling over my impending cross country flight.

Together Bob and I have looked over the navigation portion of it and the airspace part of it and I’m slowly getting my head around that. It’s challenging but not impossible. Bob appreciates my need to see the sense and reasoning behind certain things and I think it became apparently during our last briefing that the penny was slowly starting to drop.

But we haven’t touched on one area yet. One that, surprise surprise, is starting to cause me a little anxiety. It’s the radio stuff.

I usually fly form a nice controlled airport in Class C airspace. Although it is still my responsibility not to whack someone with my plane I, I have a nice ATC person telling me what to do and where to go. Out in the wide blue yonder I’m going to have to deal with flight services, mandatory frequencies, ATF’s and so on.

Worse, I’m going to have to file a flight plan! Even worse I’m going to have to make position reports! Eeek!

The flight plan form looks intimidating, and once you’ve filled the damn thing in then you have to phone it through.  We all know how much I love talking on the phone. Same with the position reporting thingy. I just feel, I dunno, a bit stupid; calling someone up on the radio and saying “Hi it’s me. I’m here.”

I mean what are they going to say in return “well done! Whatcha want me to do about it?” Obviously they aren’t but if the positions were reversed I’d be very tempted to say something similar. I must remember that not everyone is a sarcastic so and so like me.

Then I start running over the stupid, mundane details again. Like where will I park it? Where do you do your run up checks? What if I need help putting it into a space?

Again it’s all stupid stuff; I mean the idea is I’ll be doing the entire flight with Bob first one day before I attempt it myself. But my mind does this to me.

I wish it didn’t

Spotted the issue

Well at least one of them. I was reviewing my latest flight and I think I’ve spotted one of my big problems.

I was watching the video footage, mostly of my approach into city and then the resulting circuits after the overshoots. I noticed a really major thing.

I’m really impatient.

It is almost a complete turnaround from when I just couldn’t get ahead of the plane. Now I’m almost too far in front of it. I’m probably not explaining this too well. Let me give you an example of what I observed on the way back into City’s zone.

I‘m 2500ft , descending to 2000ft as required. I spot Bluffer’s in the distance, Ok time to think about getting the ATIS. I switch to that frequency and pull out the squelch knob on the radio to pick up the signal more clearly. I get the ATIS. Right, it’s a little early to switch to Tower, so let’s go back to the practice area frequency. Hmm, don’t hear anything; I fiddle with the volume a little bit. No nothing. Maybe I should switch to tower now?  So I switch to Tower, pull out the squelch, push it back in when I realise that the signal is clear enough.

I’m constantly messing with things because I won’t just sit back and fly the plane.

Same on my circuits, the reasons for my overshoots were not helped by the fact that I was turning downwind to base and then base to final, too early. My mind is planning out the fact that I need to do something soon, so I go ahead and do it because I’m too impatient to wait.

This is getting to be a little bit of a personal theme at the moment. I’m just not willing to wait for things. I’ve written posts bemoaning the fact that other people are overtaking me and the general internet-based consensus is “So what? Enjoy the journey” And whilst I know they are right my natural impetuousness is becoming an issue.

At one point in my training it was a positive advantage. I was so eager to be allowed out of the circuit on my own that I really focussed on doing what I needed to do to achieve that goal. Bob had me wanting it more than my nerves wanted me to stop.  But now I’m starting to think it’s becoming a problem.

So I’m dialling it back a little. I’m taking this weekend off flying and spending some quality time with RTH. I just need to take some breathing space and rein myself back in.

 

Pilot obligations

During a period of reflection today (yep, in the shower!) I started thinking about all the questions I ask about flying.

I have a permanent note file on my phone that I use to jot down anything I have to ask Bob as I think of it. But I ask far more questions than I ever bombard Bob with. I have a whole host of people on the other end of an email whom I constantly pump for information.

It got me thinking that no pilot I’ve ever come across has ever refused to answer a question, has never even considered doing anything other than taking the time to reply to my onslaught of questions. People don’t bat an eyelid when a simple “check out my cool new video” email elicits a whole slew of questions from me.

I’ve done the same myself, a random internet person asked me for advice about flying into CYTZ. As a mere student I wasn’t sure how much I could assist but I was able to give them some tips about the local airspace and dealing with ATC.

No matter how big or macho the egos involved, no one will ever let a fellow pilot struggle on unassisted. It seems to be an unwritten pilot code; you will answer questions posed by another pilot. As an example, a simple comment that JES seemed to be struggling to climb in a recent video, led to the pilot sharing his weight and balance calculations with me.

I’m infinitely grateful to this infinite wealth of information at my disposal. The more cynical amongst you might wonder how I know that I can rely on this advice; after all I’ve never met these people. They could be telling me anything.

True, but every single person who has ever tried to offer me assistance or has passed on any useful advice has ALWAYS prefaced it with this caveat…

“… ask your instructor first”