Pug’s Place

I didn’t blog again in July; I was pretty busy. I’m now in the very last phase of my pilot training. Saturday morning, after answering lots of questions on the ground I’m going flying with a pilot examiner to show that I’m a safe and knowledgeable pilot.

It feels like I flew more in July than I had in any other month, but I checked the numbers and that isn’t true. I suppose what is true is that I’ve done more aviation-related stuff in July than I have before. Halfway through the month I took the private pilot written exam (which was a cinch), after which I read the newly released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows novel. Dotted around the rest of the month have been flying lesson after flying lesson with my instructor polishing up my maneuvers.

Of particular difficulty to me has been my short-field landing technique: the ability to put the airplane on the ground within a 200 foot block of runway consistently. I’ve spent hours in the air working on this required maneuver until I’m starting to have a real sense of what a given engine sound versus a given headwind and altitude will yield in terms of a touchdown point. Without getting into details that the vast majority of my readership doesn’t care about, it appears I’ve found the problem I had with my short-field landing technique (power management) and I’ve figured out how to fix it in almost all cases.

Otherwise, training has been going great. My soft-field landing technique is being lauded, as are my ground reference maneuvers, steep turns and slow flight. I’ve conquered my fear of stalls: I’ve learned to do stall recoveries from turns without even having a wing twitch, so I have almost no chance of aggravating an unintentional stall into a spin. I’m sensing the first flickers of what it feels like to be a pilot, though I know I won’t be calling myself a real pilot for quite some time.

Current numbers: 153 landings, 56.2 total hours of flying, 13.5 hours solo, 5.3 hours nighttime.

My brother and his gal are in Grand Cayman this week, leaving me with the cats whose behavior hasn’t changed appreciably since I last wrote about them. I’m keeping them all fed, of course, but I can’t keep them from fighting. The hinged gate which has been carefully located in the stairwell to separate cats when I’m not home has proven ineffective; the cats can push their way underneath it, despite there being only about an inch of clearance. I haven’t seen it happen, but that’s the only explanation due to the gate’s design.

Anyway, cats aside, by the time they return on Saturday I should be holding my private pilot’s license. Which means when I come home in another week, if I wanted to I could rent a plane and go flying out of Destin. I probably won’t since I’ll be home such a short time, but that may be fun over Christmas.

The only thing geeky I’ve done recently (other than read the new Harry Potter book in an afternoon) was to convert my free software repository page to use Trac and switch my copies of Eclipse to use Mylyn. Unfortunately as of press time it looks like the repository page is broken, but I’ll try to fix that. Ah, the fun of switching to something new…