Many, many prayers for those affected by the storm and those contributing to the relief effort. Our hearts are heavy as we keep abreast of events as best we can.<\/p>\n
I’m very relieved the first flight is over. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a good amount of nervousness mixed in with the anticipation. But now I know what to expect and things will be easier. The preflight went reasonably quickly, as did the pretakeoff check. Taxiing was more of a challenge. Imagine steering and<\/i> braking your car with your feet and operating the throttle with a pushrod in your right hand. Not only that, but you can apply differential pressure on the brakes to help turn the vehicle. And that vehicle isn’t really meant to lumber about on the ground anyway. So it was tricky, and I had to take a few laps around the ramp before I got the hang of it.<\/p>\n
The flight consisted of running through checklists for various phases of flight, some medium-bank turns and some sightseeing to orient myself to the practice areas north of the airport. It was a cacophony of sensory overload, and most of what I thought I had committed to memory beforehand disappeared. But that’s just as well since we learn by doing it, not by reading a book. Still, it felt like the first time at the controls of a car in that I was “chasing the gauges” the whole way; in other words, I would go above and below the mark a few times before I settled on it, whether it be airspeed or altitude or rate of climb. I remember learning to drive and the experience of not knowing what 45 mph “felt” like–I couldn’t help but glance down at the speedometer every few seconds to recheck my speed. It’s the same way with the plane. I don’t “feel” its various states and attitudes yet. But with practice I will.<\/p>\n
A nicely-written and relevant passage from Stick and Rudder<\/i>:<\/p>\n There is a great difference between merely perceiving<\/i> something and noticing<\/i> it. A savage, put on an American city street, would see the traffic lights just as you do–maybe better. He would probably overlook them and watch instead the flashing neon signs, the lights of cars, all sorts of other clues that are more impressive but much less important; for he would not know what a traffic light means. But we see traffic signs even with bad eyes and while thinking of something else because we watch for them and understand their meaning instantly and know that, though they are not very attention-catching, they are important. […] Our difficulty in learning to fly is not sense perception, but interpretation of what our senses perceive. We tend to pay attention to the wrong things; we miss the things that matter because we aren’t looking for them, because we do not know what they mean.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oh, and Male Kitchen Fix #174: A propane torch and oven mitt work wonders for freeing stuck jar lids. Which *ahem* we never have a problem removing anyway. So it’s all hypothetical. Yeah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many, many prayers for those affected by the storm and those contributing to the relief effort. Our hearts are heavy as we keep abreast of events as best we can. I’m very relieved the first flight is over. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a good amount of nervousness mixed in with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}