Guilt free Christmas

I’m in my last week at work before the holidays and it has suddenly occurred to me: this will be the first Christmas in two years where I won’t have that little guilty pang in the back of my mind that what I really should be doing is studying for my PPL stuff.

I’ve not got the written exam to worry about and I don’t have any lessons to schedule, thus meaning I don’t have to worry about my alcohol intake and the 8 hour rule.

I won’t be stalking the weather like a crazy lady hoping to squeeze one last flight in before the snow storm hits or have to monitor the METARS looking for a break in the clouds.

I’ve got nothing really planned and a fully wine rack.

Good combo!

Threading the needle

Coming back from the trip with RTH, I dutifully dialed in and listened to the ATIS. Nothing much had changed, winds were reasonable, runway was still 08.

 I made my call and confirmed to ATC that I had indeed departed from City earlier. I swallowed hard as I read back my joining instructions….  “cleared left downwind for 08”

Ah crud, I’m not a student anymore. I don’t really have an excuse. It’s a low approach over the city for me.  Over the downtown core at 2000ft and below.

Eek.

I’m not massively comfortable with this, Toronto is a city still in the middle of an economic upturn. New towers are popping up seemingly overnight. Even since I started learning the core has changed beyond recognition in places. So now I find myself confronted with having to thread my plane between the CN tower and the new Aura condo tower at College Park, all 78 storeys of it.

Gulp

RTH recognises the unhappy noises I’m emitting and reminds me “you can always request the right downwind if you want”

I consider it, it would make me feel more comfortable but no, I need to do this. I need to salvage something tangible from this flight. An achievement. And besides the city is kinda cool up from up here and one of the things I want to do is take friends up for the city tour, I need to get used to being this low over downtown.

I bite the bullet and thread the needle, fighting the inevitable turbulence thrown up by the highways and general urban terrain. I don’t have enough eyes for this. I need to monitor my airspeed and altitude for any deviations and fix them instantly, while at the same time keeping my head on the proverbial swivel for the other sightseeing traffic around.

Obviously I did an Okay job as RTH seemed more concerned with taking pictures than my proximity to the local landmarks!

Next post I’ll pull some of his pictures for you, they are incredible. I’m glad one of us was able to enjoy the view.

Mission aside I think my next flight is going to include a City tour, now that I’ve figured out how to thread the needle, I’m going to sew my name in the sky!

Inevitability

Forecast tonight is calling for 5cm of snow. The wet, sticky kind. Along with winds gusting up to 35 mph.

Yeti suit aside, it’s going to be a crappy trudge into work tomorrow  

I’m a better pilot….

RTH noticed that I was less than enthusiastic about my performance from our inaugural flight. He, himself was quite reassuring about the whole thing, whilst acknowledging that, yes things hadn’t gone to plan, he was quick to point out that all three of us (LFE, RTH and SAR) were all in one piece. I know he was trying to be supportive, perhaps concerned that a temporary setback would destroy my confidence and that I’d be hesitant to try again (a situation not without precedent).

I’ll admit, there was a lot going through my mind and I really wasn’t a happy bunny but I’ve had time to think and it may have taken me a couple of days to get my mind around it all. I think I’m there though.

Firstly I am still a little annoyed, as I said to RTH “I’m a better pilot than what I showed you today”

Secondly though I’ve come to terms with a few things. Probably obvious things to some people but, as usual, I’m late to the party.

Everyone touts your PPL as a “licence to learn” and I’ve tritely batted that phrase around myself and glibly claimed that I understood what it meant.

I didn’t, until now.

At the moment the only difference between pre PPL LFE and post PPL LFE is a shiny blue booklet and two hours of flight time. I didn’t know everything then and I don’t know everything now. I made mistakes then and I’m going to make mistakes now. It’s inevitable.

The problem comes if you don’t use those mistakes as a learning experience and believe me I’ve spent many a mental moment evaluating that flight and working out what I could have done instead.  A dangerous pilot isn’t necessarily one who doesn’t make mistakes, it is one who doesn’t evaluate and learn from them.

So we’ve got that part covered.

I’ll learn and move on.

The next phrase that struck home to me is from the internet* “Without the risk of failure, success is meaningless”

I set myself a near impossible goal to get my PPL. It was an epic struggle, at any point I could have stopped, the power on stalls could have gotten too scary, the wake turbulence incident shaken me up too much. I didn’t stop. I had failures on the way as well as successes. But I picked myself up, shook myself down and pressed on. I kept plugging away at it and eventually I succeeded. There was always a fear of failure but in the end the desire to succeed was just too strong.

My “Mission”, self-inflicted as it is, may turn out to be an equally epic struggle. Probably with as many bumps along the way as my PPL. So now that I’ve hit one of those bumps along the road, I have a choice. Just as I did with my PPL, either I learn from the experience and move on, or I quit.

Well I didn’t spend two and a half years and a stupid amount of money to stop that easily.

I’ll learn from the experience and carry on. It just sucks a little bit that this learning opportunity happened on my first bloody flight with RTH!

And while I didn’t show RTH the pilot that I wanted to that flight, next time it’ll be an even better pilot sat next to him.

* see useful stuff occasionally found here 

Getting my head round it all.

Those of you who follow this blog will know that Sunday was the day I was meant to start my epic planned “Mission”

You may have also noticed that the blog has been strangely quiet on the whole matter. I mean there haven’t been any triumphant “Mission accomplished” posts or any bitching about the weather either.

So what’s up?

Well the truth is it didn’t go exactly according to plan, which I don’t necessarily have a problem writing about but I started writing this post about 3 times now and tailed off. Not really knowing where to take it.

Which means I didn’t have my thoughts straight in my head yet.  I’m good at writing reflective stuff but only once I’ve got some finality in what it is I’ve learned.

Two days later and I think I’m coming to terms with it all.

Let me explain.

On paper the aim of the flight was to head out to the east, then north to Uxbridge and see if I could find Greenbank airport. A grass strip where I first learnt the dark art of the precautionary and indeed a softfield landing.

Of course the grass nature would mean that I couldn’t actually land, the flight school’s insurance won’t let me take it on anything other than a paved surface. But I’d planned a low and over and considered that close enough.

In my head the flight had a different purpose. I wanted to show off to RTH. I wanted him to see that in the last two years or so, I’ve become a different person in that cockpit. A safe, calm, competent and confident pilot.

Long story short, that didn’t happen.

To cut to the chase, the following things happened:

1)      I got flustered by some traffic on the way out of the zone and got fixated on overtaking them

2)      I got confused by the traffic at Greenbank using what I considered to be the wrong runway, this threw off my spatial awareness and I got hopelessly confused trying to join a right hand circuit. I ended up calling it off.

3)      The approach to 08 over the city stressed me out a little

4)      I finished as I started – with a less than stellar landing. Nothing dangerous, just “firm”

Please don’t misunderstand – I didn’t do anything dangerous, it just didn’t go according to either plan. And for a little while that left me a little disheartened and a little p!ssed off with myself.

But over the next couple of posts I’ll explain exactly what went wrong and why I’m kind of ok with it now.

Rules of engagement

The weather is looking just perfect, sun, no precipitation forecast, winds due to swing around to right down the runway. A great day to go flying.

This was going to be my second flight since getting my license and my first with RTH as my passenger. To be honest I was probably more nervous with him on board than I was with K and M.

RTH and I are blessed with the kind of relationship where we actually talk to each other and we knew that this situation had the potential to cause all kinds of interesting issues. So we’ve agreed on some “Rules of Engagement” in the hope that we can pre-empt some of these concerns.

I have no doubt that this list will grow as we encounter new situations, but the list looks like this for the moment

·         Each flight will have one person designated as PIC, they may want the other person to help out with any tasks such as navigating etc but they are PIC

·         The PIC makes all decisions with regard to go/no go decisions on the ground and in the air

·         On hearing “go around”, whoever is flying does exactly that, we discuss why  once we are back at a stable flying level.*

·         There is to be no taking of the controls – at least not without mutual consent and positive handover (I have control etc.)

Hopefully this will be good enough to keep us safe in the air and speaking on the ground.

* This kind of happened to RTH when he was flying with another pilot. RTH was the passenger, on landing he saw some power lines that he wasn’t sure if the pilot had. He called out “power!” The other pilot apparently executed a flawless go around and they came back for another try! Good observation on RTH’s part and awesome flying from the other pilot in that he didn’t ask what or why, just did it and then had the discussion!

Weather permitting

“The Mission” starts tomorrow.

Got an interesting first airport picked out and RTH on board for the first time!

Can’t wait!