update

so I haven't updated in quite a while. some other things have been going on and I just haven't felt like updating. but its 5:30am and I cannot get to sleep so I figured why not.
still having difficulties with getting my medical which is highly discouraging... they have no reason t deny me my medical now so I just need to be patient.
I went on my first cross-country and my first night xc not too long ago.. very cool. also got to take a ride in a piper seminole at night. that was awesome as well. don't get much of a chance to be a passenger.

I guess that is all for now. will try to update more often.

Medical Difficulties

Let me first start off by saying that I am writing this blog entry from my new smart phone. Pretty snazzy, eh?
Haven't written a lot lately because I haven't had that much going on. The most recent thing that has come up was that I got a denial in the mail from the FAA. Needless to say, I was disappointed. i've been meaning to sit down with the chief flight instructor at Sterling because he said he would help me write an appeal letter back. I also need to wait until my doc gets back in town and speak with her...
I am hoping things work out and I am trying not to get too discouraged but it's difficult. I can't lose flying..
just gotta keep my head up..

...

Haven't posted much lately because I kinda forgot for a while that I had this, lol.
There isn't much to really talk about, though, so I'll keep it fairly short.

My landings have gotten better, like tenfold... maybe even more than that. I can do 90% of my landings unassisted now. Still need to get the hang of turns around a point, s-turns, and steep turns, but my stalls are ok. I have a hard time recognizing when the plane has actually stalled because it doesn't always do an abrupt nose-over like it does sometimes. I'm good on the recovery, just not so much the recognition...
In ground, we've gotten into the hard stuff: weight and balance. So.. many.. NUMBERS!!
I'll get it sooner or later.


Anyway, that's all for now.

Stalls

Don't feel like writing much today, I've got a bad headache, but..
Went over to Fernandina, didn't land there but we did some maneuvers around the area. Some slow flight, which is easy, steep turns, which I still don't have down yet, power off stalls, which aren't as scary as they seem, and Sean demonstrated a power on stall. I did NOT like it at all, and he doesn't like doing them either, which in turn, makes me nervous. But it has to be done.
Did some touch and goes. It's been like a month since I've landed so I have to get back into the routine of doing things again. I'm not quite fine-tuned yet, but I'll get it down, I suppose.

that's all for today.

Flight Lesson 4

Uhh.. flight lesson 4 today.
We got steep turns, more slow flight, an introduction to stalls, a few touch and goes, and a slip.

Don't feel like writing much today, but..
Taxied out, noticed the attitude indicator wasn't working, it was showing all wonky and whatnot. I asked Sean if it was a big deal and he said it wasn't, because we don't rely on our instruments in VFR flight. Then, since it wouldn't be a "distraction", he tore off a piece of paper and completely covered it up, with me going, "Aww c'mon, that's not fair!" I usually rely on the attitude indicator to tell me how steep I'm turning, and since we were doing steep turns today, I thought it might be a problem. But as we flew around, did some slow flight, and when he went to demonstrate how to do steep turns (it's more than just turning sharply, you also have to throttle up about 100rpms and remember to maintain altitude, which I found difficult), he uncovered it and it was working fine, so it was all good.
Believe it or not, my turns to the right were a helluva lot better than my turns to the left, which is funny because I find turning to the right difficult since I'm on the left side of the plane. But yeah, Sean said my turns to the left were within pts standards. Awesome. :)
Did a slip, that feels weird. From what I gathered, a slip is a way to lose a lot of altitude when you're coming in to land. You turn the aelerons into the wind and put in full opposite rudder, so the plane is coming in sideways to the runway. Before you come to the runway, you recover, slowly, and land normally.

Yeah so I guess that's it. The Warrior is going down for its 100-hr for a while and the Zenith is down as well, so I'm not sure when the next time I get to fly is. Sigh. At least I got to fly today. :D

Flight Lesson 3

It took me a while to get around to updating this today, 'cos I was feeling kinda tired so I went to sleep and just woke up about 30 minutes ago, haha.

But anyway, I digress. The picture on the right is from my flight lesson today. Who took it, you may ask? Why, my father. I asked my dad if he would like to fly along with me sometime and he said he'd love that, so today I took him along. Sean asked me when I asked him if it'd be alright to take my dad along if I was sure I wanted to bring him along for slow flight, but I said yeah, it'd be no big deal.
So last time, Sean introduced slow flight. When he did it last time, I was kind of iffy about it, because you're flying along as slow as you can possibly go, weird angle of attack, flaps fully extended, with the stall horn blaring in your ear. It's kind of ingrained in you that stall horn = bad, you know? But slow flight was actually not all that bad. Sean made no hesitations in telling me that I got it down much quicker than he had expected, even quicker than he had when he did it, so that made me feel good. I don't quite have the procedure down yet, but he said that when we go up from now on, we're going to incorporate slow flight, for about 15 minutes or so, until I get it down. Fine by me, it was a breeze. Turns in slow flight are deliberate and slow (duh), and easy, though it took me a few tries to get on the correct heading, which it normally doesn't, but I didn't want to turn too fast for fear of actually stalling the plane.
So I've got slow flight down. He also asked me if I wanted to try steep turns today, because I've gotten to where I can easily do 30 degree turns, no problem at all. I wasn't quite sure, but he demonstrated them for me, and said if I started feeling uncomfortable, to just tell him and he'd recover the plane. Turns to the left aren't all the bad, but turns to the right, whether I'm doing it or he's doing it, are kind of weird. I guess it's because I'm sitting on the left side of the plane. Sean said when he first became a flight instructor, it was almost as if he had to relearn everything from the right side of the plane.
Did a few touch-and-goes, didn't do so well on the landings today, but ahh well, he also said that we'd do more touch and goes each time we go up. I'll get better. :)

Guess that's about it. I uploaded a ton of photos, but they're on my Facebook.


Edit: I just remembered. A little bit after we'd taken off, while we were flying out over the coast, some people came over the frequency talking to each other, and one of the people were talking about these two F-16s flying in formation that had just flown past them. We all looked to see if we could see them, but they'd gone into the clouds. Bummer.

Unassisted Landing

Today was a great day for sure. Today I did my FIRST UNASSISTED landing, meaning I landed that damn plane all by my-very-own-self. And it felt great, it really did.
We started out today by taking off out of KCRG, duh, and heading towards Fernandina where we did a few touch and goes there. We flew out over the coast, out over the water, which is still a little scary to me, but I asked, "Hey, you know.. like.. if the engine were to quit right now by some random chance, would we be able to land on the beach?" And the answer was yes, of course. From where we would, Sean said we more than likely would've been able to land at Fernandina as well, so that kind of quelled my fears.
So we did a few touch and goes there, about three I guess, before we took back off and headed for Cecil. Did one touch and go assisted and then the next, I did all by myself. And .. god, like.. man. I don't know what to say about it, lol, it was just fantastic. The feeling of actually having had accomplished something like that is overwhelming. It makes me feel all cocky, like I could do just about anything right now. Like fly to the moon and back, idk.
I actually didn't even realize that I'd landed by myself until Sean had said something. I was concentrating so much on what I was doing, keeping center line, watching my airspeed, concentrating on when to flare, etc etc, that I wasn't even watching Sean to see if he was helping me. It wasn't until he said, "Well Jessica, you just did your first unassisted landing." that I was like.. "well, wow. okay. Awesome."
He also introduced slow flight today, which I'm not really liking. Slow flight is basically flying the plane as slow as it will go, keeping the stall horn on for as long as possible. From what Sean said, it's also basically showing you how you do your approaches when you come in to land, except you're like.. 3500ft as opposed to about 1000. He showed me how to do it and then afterwards, I was like, "eehhh let's not do that today. Can we just do some touch and goes?" which we did.. So slow flight next time, as well as power on and power off stalls. I'm not looking forward to that at all, but hey, it has to be done, so whatev.

Until next time.