millième

Is there anything more mind-bendingly aggravating (or as the French would say, agaçant) than a printer or a fax machine that won’t print properly? Much of the film Office Space is a parody or an exaggeration of real office life, but the scene in which Michael (the programmer) gets irate at the fax machine in the office is completely true to reality. They do that and we react like that. My printer went through the same ritual earlier, totally denying that it had paper even though there was ample paper in the tray, a litany of creaky mechanical noises, a few blank sheets of paper as an offering before finally relenting and complying with my request to print the document. Amazing. There’s got to be a better way to do this. The process involved in getting something from the screen onto a page should not be this convoluted. It’s Rube Goldberg-ism at its finest.

No wind = calm air = little turbulence = smooth flying = no one to blame but yourself for mistakes in the air.

Skyhawks on the flight line. I flew “Seven Eight Golf” today, my least favorite of the fleet. It has a slight but persistent tendency during flight to list to the right slightly on account of the fact that it was, um, “bent” and repaired. As the story goes, a former MAI student had the bright idea that he would land the airplane in his girlfriend’s backyard (which must have been sizable). Evidently his efforts to impress her were doomed to failure when he landed the plane poorly and capsized it. So the plane was brought back to Sugar Valley and repaired, but not without inducing the evident right-banking tendency. It’s the aviation equivalent of a limp and requires constant correction in flight.

I finished my first semester of flight training today! I took my stage check (read: exam) with the lead instructor and head of MAI, Mr. Kelly. In his words, I did “very well.” If I had to describe it, I would say that I did several things, er… less than perfectly, among them some navigation and directional control on the first takeoff, but all things considered… My maneuvers were flawless, takeoffs and landings were right on the numbers and I did find my way to Rowan County airport fairly well. Ultimately it was almost as satisfying as yesterday, when I flew for about two and a half hours total, an hour and a half by myself and another hour with Mr. Hahn, practicing almost everything we had done the whole semester.

So from a conceptual standpoint, I can fly the airplane completely by myself (the goal of Flight I). Flight II stresses getting me where I want to go, i.e. navigation. I’ve had a peek at the syllabus–after the first long flight (“cross country”) there are a few sessions where fly at night, one of which is even a longish flight over to the airport in Siler City. I’m looking forward to that–night flight is fun by all accounts.

I’m off to Starbucks.