BoldUlysses.com

I’m wiped out. I’m going to skip Bible study tonight and take it easy. The weather in the mornings has been stellar this week and I’ve flown all three of my flight blocks, including this morning.

My cross-country flights are finished. Today I flew solo to Stanly County, near Albemarle, did three takeoffs and landings at a towered airport as per the FAA Private Pilot requirement, flew east to Sanford-Lee Regional and then back home. I was in the plane for about two and a half hours and my butt was thoroughly numb by the time I landed for the day.

Managing communications, my last area of hesitation, wasn’t difficult at all. The controller at Stanley was friendly and inquired about which flight school I was with. The airport is not very frequented and it’s slightly mystifying as to why they have a tower in the first place. The controller sounded bored and I think he was glad for the traffic.

Flying back to Sugar Valley, I grazed up against Greensboro airspace so I called Approach Control to get flight following. After I made the cold call and announced my position they told me to squawk and ident. I realized I had forgotten to switch my transponder to “altitude” but had been tooling blissfully around central NC with it in standby mode. That was a little embarrassing, but only to myself I think. I wasn’t very near their core airspace so they didn’t vector me at all, and a few minutes after switching frequencies to the western side of approach control I requested “own navigation,” closed my flight plan and descended toward home. The whole flight was a real confidence-booster, although I will say after that much time in the sky saying nothing except talking to myself and emitting brief bursts of efficient communication over the radio, all my conversational responses for the rest of the day have been equally clipped. It’s kind of weird.

On a slightly related note, here’s an excerpt from an interesting article in the latest issue of AOPA’s Flight Training magazine. The article’s on learning to be the Pilot In Command (or PIC) of the airplane, really the goal of flight training (emphasis added):

The status of a pilot in command, whether it’s a student flying solo in a training aircraft or an airline transport pilot with 300 passengers in a jumbo jet, is that of a decision maker. Initially, students are control manipulators, pure and simple. Which maneuver to practice and how to perform it is determined by the CFI [Certified Flight Instructor] in the right seat. Later in the program, however, the student pilot will have to rely on stored memory, notes and self-scoring of the results. After solo, flight training is a shared responsibility […]

Decision-making is the only real purpose that a pilot has in the cockpit. Given the parameters, one could program a computer to guide a modern aircraft. No computer, however, can evaluate a flock of birds congregating on the downwind leg and recalculate the widened pattern, with revised timing of power, trim and flap adjustments. Similarly, the complexity of an en-route weather decision requires a pilot in command to obtain the latest information from various sources, consider the available options with the fuel remaining and select an appropriate course of action. In the interest of providing a safe training environment, students are often supervised to the point of making very few decisions. This is necessary early in the program, but as the student acquires knowledge and skill, verified by evaluation, some responsibility shifts to the pilot in training. This culminates in the transition to solo flight. Suddenly there is only one individual in the airplane, and a new PIC is born.

Going skiing tomorrow. Here’s hoping the Huge Winter Blizzard™ either holds off or dissipates during the night.