Category: flight review

Flight Log – 2015-01-05

After more than 14 months without flying, I finally got back in the air today and completed a flight review, so I am again legal to act as pilot-in-command and carry passengers.  It was pretty dang cold, temp -9°C, winds 270@10, alt 30.51, clouds clear (at start, high clouds were moving in by the end).  I need to knock some rust off, but Harold (the instructor) actually complimented me on the smoothness of 2 of my 4 landings (the other 2 were fine, too, just not as nice as the 2 he commented on).  Not bad after so much time off.  Next month I’ll get an IPC (instrument proficiency check) and become instrument-current again, too.

Takeoffs & landings: 4
Time: 1.0
Total time: 224.4

Flight log 2012-07-13

Flight review complete. Temp was a very pleasant 23°F, but the wind got ugly for the final 2 landings. Winds 140@13G22. Alt. 30.19. Did the GPS28@4I3, cirle to 10, followed by 2 touch and goes, followed by VOR-A@KVTA, circle to 9, touch and go, and full stop. I used Foreflight on the iPad for the approaches, no paper plates in the cockpit.

Flight Log 2010-06-29, etc.

Tuesday was a very busy day, but one of the results was a successfully completed flight review. My hour of ground was actually kind of fun. Harold had a couple of quizzes for me that I did pretty well on and we reviewed some of the FAR/AIM that I haven’t looked at recently. Then we went out for some air work. Temp was 22°C, altimeter 30.03, wind at the surface was reported as 070@06, but was closer to a 90° crosswind as we got going and about 100 feet up it was probably closer to 20 knots. We did the GPS27 approach and circle to land on runway 9, then actually ended up spending most of the hour on crosswind landings (which is not a bad way to spend an hour). One thing I discovered is that I’m much more comfortable landing (or taking off) with a crosswind from the right than I am with one from the left, so it was good practice with this one coming from the left. Ended up with exactly the required 1.0 on the Hobbs, so I’ve jumped through that hoop for the FAA and I’m good for another two years.

Tuesday was also Erin’s 22nd birthday and my parents had called the previous week to say they were bringing my nephew up to visit Cincinnati, so we all went to see the Reds play at Great American Ballpark. It was a pretty good game, but not the outcome I would have preferred. Joey Votto hit a 3-run homer in the bottom of the 9th to tie the game, but then Arthur Rhodes had his first bad outing really of the season and gave up 3 runs without retiring a batter in the top of the 10th, so the Reds lost to the Phillies (I suppose my baby sister was probably happy about that). Oh, well. So, all-in-all, a mostly enjoyable day. We did the traditional birthday meal at a (new) Japanese steakhouse on Wednesday instead and that was also nice.

On Wednesday, I finally (after 6 years) got my online logbook working the way I had envisioned it from the beginning, so it now pulls from the database dynamically rather than just showing static pages that I had to manually update everytime I updated the database. Unfortunately, I haven’t configured the widget at the left here to do so yet, maybe next year.

My flight review

Yesterday (well, it will be 2 days ago by the time this gets published), I had my flight review.  For those who don’t know, private pilots in the US are required to have a flight review with a flight instructor at least every two years in order to continue to fly (to maintain an ATP requires more frequent recurrent training).  With the thunderstorms the night before, I had difficulty sleeping (and more importantly getting up when the alarm went off), so I was afraid I was going to be late.  It turned out, the instructor’s power went out overnight, so his alarm didn’t go off.  I ended up actually arrive right at the time that I had scheduled the review for, but the instructor ended up being about 30 minutes late.  That was okay, though, I had blocked out 4 hours for the 1 hour of ground instruction and 1 hour of flight instruction required by the FAA.  I actually had hoped to make this both a flight review and instrument proficiency check, but we ran too late to actually accomplish the latter (I’ll try to schedule some time with the instructor next month to get that done).  I did finally fly a complete GPS approach (the GPS27 @ KVTA).  It actually was extremely hazy and we encountered the base of the clouds at about 2700 feet (MSL), so I might as well have done nearly the entire flight under the hood given how little I could actually see.  While doing some of the touch and goes, I was able to see some of the flooding in the area (we got 5″ of rain overnight).  We got another 2+ inches last night and the radar is looking like we’ll get a good bit more tonight.