Flying for Fun and for Money

but haven’t had the time for.

Good grief, it’s been too long since I updated this blog. I’ve had tons of great ideas for things to write about, but been too busy to put any in to the computer.

First off, some good news, I soloed my first student at the flight school a couple weekends ago. Here he is, blasting off into the wild blue for the first time alone:

The only problem was that it was literally about 10 degrees out. Here I am, trying to fight off frostbite while I watched my guy loop around the pattern a few times:

But it still felt great to send a new student out solo again. He was the first guy I’ve soloed in about ten months I think, so I’m glad I broke the trend.

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Another benefit I love about flight instructing is the flexible schedule and good times it offers.

A couple weeks ago I started cross country training with a student. We decided to fly down to Kansas City’s Downtown airport, KMKC, and get some food. My student brought his brother along for the ride and the three of us set out to find some of KC’s world famous BBQ.

Since I knew we’d be out late, I blocked off my schedule in the morning, slept in, and didn’t roll in to work until almost noon. Then we left on our trip about 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

Here we are, climbing out of Lincoln on a beautiful, glassy smooth evening:

We went out to a place called Jack Stack Barbeque. Apparently it’s one of the best BBQ joints in KC:
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After eating there, I can see why. The place was fantastic. Nice atmosphere, good service, and of course high quality BBQ. Ten bucks got me a huge sandwich. I intended to document it for this blog before eating it, but it looked so delicious that I completely forgot to grab my camera and snarfed the sandwich as soon as they brought it out. By the time I took a picture this was all that was left:

Then we had a smooth trip home and landed about 11 o’clock in the evening. What other job pays a guy to sleep late, fly to another city, have dinner, and fly home? For all the downsides at times, this can really be a sweet gig.

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And my last bit of news for the moment is that I’ve finally filled up my second logbook. It contains my previous 900 hours or so of flying. After filling it up, I couldn’t help but slowly thumb back through it and re-live many of the flights from the past couple years.

It reminded me of how fortunate I am. While looking back over those flights, it made me realize how many awesome things I’ve been able to experience as a result of being a pilot.

I’ve flown all over the country, in all different kinds of planes, with all different kinds of people. To be honest, there’s simply no way I can do it justice in this blog. Literally dozens, if not hundreds, of stories could be told.

How can I describe watching the sun set over the snow-capped mountains of western Montana, or the feeling of rolling a taildragger’s wheels on to a lush grass runway in Pennsylvania? How can I sum up all the friendships made with students over the past three years of teaching, or the lessons learned while taking checkrides from five examiners who have a combined experience level of more than 75,000 flight hours? How do I put in to words the sickening feeling of winds forcing me in to a mountain ridge line, or the joy I get from seeing a friend smile during their first ride in a small plane?

I can’t. And those are only a fraction of the things I think about as I flip through those pages.

I decided to take a few minutes and figure out some stats from my logbook though. I found that I’ve flown with more than 120 people over the past five years. 16 of those were instructors teaching me, more than 50 were students who I was giving instruction to, 5 were examiners I took checkrides from, and about 30 were friends who I took up for a ride just for the heck of it.

I’ve landed at 125 airports literally from coast to coast and logged time in 22 unique makes and models of aircraft, everything from taildraggers from the 1940s all the way up to a 2005 Cessna 172 equipped with a G1000 glass cockpit.

Geeze…I’m a lucky guy. What more can I say?

Thanks for reading.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 2:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.