Pug’s Place

I took about two hours this morning and got back into flying — I hadn’t flown since the second week of December. I felt the need to not only taste some sky but to also practice some of the basics again: stalls, slow flight, specialty landings and so forth. So I took N60616 around Maricopa doing maneuvers, then did some short field and slips-to-land sort of landings.

Anyway, a middle-aged sort of gentleman helped me push my plane back into its parking space and, after talking with him a few minutes, I learned that he was a student pilot (around 17 hours) and starting to contemplate the scary idea of soloing sometime soon. After tying my plane down I walked back over to where he was preflighting his aircraft for a lesson and gave him my contact information, telling him that if he ever wanted to talk with or ask some questions of another new pilot to give me a ring.

We’ll see if he does. And we’ll see if I completely forget about this exchange by the time he calls/emails.

I flew my former flight instructor Jason and my brother Chris to Sedona, AZ yesterday for lunch. I had promised this trip to my instructor back in January, so it probably counts as being “long-awaited.” Sedona is about 100 miles north of here, located in the middle of the Red Rock Country; you may remember Katie and I heading up that way last March.

I won’t blather too long about the flight, but we did fly over Sky Harbor on both legs of the trip, got to fly over a landing 737, had turbulence on the trip back and had a nasty crosswind when landing again at Stellar. Now I’m confident that I can navigate to, negotiate and land at Sedona Airport, even located as it is on top of a 500′ tall mesa overlooking the city. So, now people have to come visit.
You can see a Flickr photoset of Chris’ pictures from yesterday here.

This morning I took Chris for a one hour flight around the southern portion of the Valley. Grats to Chris for being my first passenger! We started off by flying over our house and doing a nice slow turn around it for Chris to take some photos. Afterward we headed to Casa Grande for Chris to get another look into the giant strip mine, flew from there west to fly along the Sierra Estrella mountains back to South Mountain, back over our house again and then back to Stellar. I made a map of our flight path for all of you to be entertained.
Pictures from Chris are online here.

At the end of my 1 hour flight today with Chris I have 60.3 hours of flying time, 16.5 as pilot in command. So, officially, I was a 57.3 hour private pilot (as my checkride was 2 hours long).

I’ve now done the final tally for the cost it took for me to go from 0 to Private Pilot. It’s at the bottom of this post; if you don’t want to see it, don’t click the “read more” text. Yes, it’s painful.

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My name’s Pug and I am a Private Pilot.

Yesterday was my checkride (the FAA practical test for the Private Pilot certificate); I awoke extra-early to be at the airport by 5:45 am, paperwork and supplies in hand. Shortly after 6 am the examiner arrived, we were introduced and spent the next hour reviewing and typing up paperwork. After a short coffee break we closed the room’s door and without ceremony the oral examination started in earnest. He put a lot of emphasis on class E airspace, types of fronts, engines and emergency scenarios; after about two hours of questioning I was deemed knowledgeable enough to continue. Around 9:45 am we took to the sky and started following my flight plan I devised the night before to take us to Safford, AZ, the location I was given by the examiner. About the time we passed the San Tan Mountains we found ourselves heading into decreasing visibility and virga conditions, as the visibility ahead got worse I decided to eschew my carefully planned headings and fly around the weather to re-intercept the course toward Safford on the other side. I described my intentions as I undertook them to the examiner and he simply nodded. Clear of the weather and back on course, as we flew past Coolidge airport the examiner announced that I should divert to Eloy Municipal airport. I calculated a course, distance and time to arrive and made it so. We overflew Eloy, the examiner had me put on my view-limiting goggles (to enter simulated instrument conditions) and I started tracking radials into the Stanfield VOR. After proving some proficiency at radio-navigation we did an unusual attitude recovery. Compared with what my instructor trained me to deal with, it was tame. When I was allowed to look up and take the controls the plane was in a half-power 40 degree climb with a 30 degree bank to the right; It took me less than a second — literally — to have the airplane back in level flight. Within three seconds I asked, “what altitude would you like me to fly?” The examiner was smiling at me when I asked that question. Thank you, Jason!

I took the “foggles” (view-limiting goggles) off at this point and demonstrated my maneuvers. We started with a steep turn where I held altitude pretty well and hit my wake turbulence every time. I also predicted the wake turbulence before it happened: “Starting to roll out, and we’re about to hit our wake turbulence… *bumpbump* there it is…” From the steep turns I did a power-off stall straight ahead. I held our heading within 5 degrees and lost about 30 feet of altitude during the stall. Then I spent about four minutes setting up for the power-on stall: First I had to get the plane correctly re-trimmed from the steep turn, then I wanted to turn away from the hills I was flying toward, and then I realized I had flown into a bunch of turbulence. Anyway, after I got the plane back where I wanted it I did the power-on stall straight ahead and didn’t veer from my heading at all. I didn’t lose any altitude, either, I just stopped climbing for a few seconds. I barely got the plane back into a cruise configuration before the examiner pulled the throttle back and said, “Your engine has suddenly failed.”

I pulled the nose back to set the plane’s airspeed at 68 knots, the best-glide-distance speed. After I captured 68 knots and nosed the plane back down to hold it I did a rough trim job and took a look around for someplace to land. We weren’t near enough to any airports so I picked a dirt field over my right shoulder. I really liked the field because it was empty, hard-looking, long and next to an occupied house [here it is on Google Maps]. I started a turn to the right to point toward that field and checked all the obvious things to bring the engine back to life: I simulated switching fuel tanks and pushing in on the fuel cut-off valve. I simulated turning on the fuel pump, putting the fuel mixture to full-rich and increasing the throttle. I simulated trying the different magneto positions and cranking the starter, and then I pulled out the checklist. I ran through the “Engine failure in flight” and “Engine failure: No restart” checklists and simulated declaring an emergency: faked setting the transponder to 7700, switching to the emergency frequency and called (without transmitting) “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Cessna 5325-November 6 miles south of Stanfield VOR, engine out, forced landing in a field north of the canal.” I then simulated securing the engine (engaging the fuel cut-off valves) and set up for the landing. I described to the passenger that right before we touched down we were going to pop open our doors and after the plane stopped we were going to exit immediately out to the wingtips and circle around to meet in front of the nose while staying clear of the prop. I flew a normal-looking traffic pattern around the field, putting in flaps when I was on final and sure I was going to miss the power lines. I flew the plane in really close to the ground and was getting ready to flare the plane for landing - right next to these people’s house. I’m sure there were people home, and if they were looking outside they would have seen some random airplane about to land in their yard. I was perhaps 50 feet off the ground when the examiner shoved the throttle forward and said “Your engine power returned!” I’m sure that the engine hitting full power kicked up a cloud of dust in that field.

I’m pretty sure getting that close to private property in a non-emergency situation is illegal, but I wasn’t about to say that to the examiner.

As I climbed away from the field the examiner asked me to do some ground reference maneuvers. Over that canal I mentioned before I did a series of S-turns, and then just down the fields from those I did a turn around a corner of yet another field. With these things satisfying him, he told me to go to the nearest airport and show him a soft-field landing. The nearest airport was - I was in luck - Phoenix Regional, the airport at which I’ve done the majority of my landings. I pointed us that way and cruised over and did a poor soft-field landing. D’oh! I flared too high and hit the ground too hard on the main gear - a no-no on soft landing strips. He asked me to do a normal landing next, which I accomplished without difficulty, followed by my dreaded short-field landing. I’ve been stressing over my short-field landing skills for the past few weeks (as has my instructor!), but when asked to do one for the examiner I managed to get it done. After that landing we headed back to my home airport. Those minutes were quiet, restful. He didn’t ask anything of me, instead just letting me fly the plane, make my radio calls and enter the traffic pattern at Stellar. This was to be my redeeming soft-field landing, my second chance, back at my home airport. The implication was clear: no more chances, this is where we’re landing and stopping… and I did it! I set the main gear down softly and held up the nose as long as I could. After we parked the plane the examiner held out his hand and said, “Congratulations, you pass your test. I’ll meet you inside.”

The pictures of my last landing and the celebratory shots of my new pilot’s certificate are up here. Additionally, you finally get to see my decorated shirt-tail (remember, the one cut off after I soloed?), as done by Shannon.

Interestingly, while I was busy flying, Tux was having adventures around Stellar Airpark without me. E. can sympathize, as she often took Tux adventuring.

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…

This morning I took to the sky and headed west to a state I had formerly not visited. I flew a bit over 350 miles from Phoenix to Blythe, California as my “long” cross country flight: One of the requirements for my pilot’s certificate is to take a solo flight and make three landings to a full stop at three different airports, two of which must be at least 50 miles apart with a total distance of at least 150 miles. Since I hadn’t been to California, I decided (with my flight instructor’s approval) to fly there for this long trip. I took off from Stellar, circumnavigated the Sierra Estrella mountains westbound to Buckeye Airport and then flew west over 70 miles of semi-empty desert to California. The flight out was totally uneventful - exactly as I like it. The air was smooth and the air temperature - at 6,500 feet - was a cool 73 degrees. At the end of my flight the desert turned verdant green and I knew I found the Colorado River.

I began descending into Blythe when I flew over the I-10 bridge across the Colorado River. I then skirted the south side of the city of Blythe and landed at its airport. Blythe Airport has freshly-painted runway markings but the lone hanger has seen better days. I did a lousy job of parking the plane (though the parking area was almost empty), shut it off and walked into the little building. The Fixed Base Operator (FBO) was quite polite and didn’t look at me odd when I walked in wearing my Gators hat and said, “So, this is California.” He just looked tired and said, “Yeah” and looked back to his TV. I bought a bottle of fruit juice and walked out to call home. I talked to Mom and Dad to say I was in California for the first time, they were surprised, suddenly worried and not a little upset. Standing in the shade of the plane’s wing with the air temperature a moderate 109 degrees I tried to reassure them that the flight was fine, I wasn’t tired, the plane was fine, I had my plan to get back and the weather was beautiful (if hot). After I got off the phone with Mom and Dad I called Chris to assure him as well that I was fine. After I took a couple pictures posing with the plane I taxied back to the wind-favored runway and took to the air again, this time climbing to 7,500 feet and heading back to Phoenix via Gila Bend.

I backtracked into Arizona until I had passed around the restricted / military airspace in the western part of the state and then headed southeast to Gila Bend. Remember, to count as my “long” cross country flight I had to land (and stop) at three airports. After suffering through some increasing turbulence (due to increasing air temperature), I overflew the town of Gila Bend and landed at its deserted airport. The landing was sweet, I taxied clear and returned to the departure area to take off again one last time for the day, this time headed for my home airport of Stellar. (I had to come to a full stop for this to count, so this is what’s called a “full stop with a taxi-back”).

The flight back to Stellar was just full of turbulence; it was noon in the desert with an air temperature of 97 degrees at 3,500 feet: nasty. This is why I started the flight early in the morning, and why I keep waking up early on the weekends to fly! Anyway, I had no trouble keeping the plane under control, on course and at my desired altitude, it was just uncomfortable. The turbulence made my landing at Stellar none too pretty, but it was both safe and acceptable.

So, anyway, now I’ve visited California and I can report that it appears to exist. You can see more pictures here at Flickr.

In other news: In honor of the Fourth, one of Chris’ friends is having a Transformers-and-pool-party; we’re seeing Transformers in the morning and then going to hang out by his pool. Otherwise, no other plans. Work continues to keep me challenged and busy and I’ve booked a flight to come home for a couple days in August (unfortunately work deadlines kept me from making it more than a few days long).

Finally, the few pictures Stephen and I took on our trip to Vegas (mostly of his old house) are online, too.

The good news: I’m 31.1 hours into my private pilot certificate and now I’m ready to start my solo “cross-country” flights. One of my homework assignments this week is to chart out a flight to some airport at least 50 nm away (that’s “cross-country”); I’ll probably fly there next Saturday morning and that will take care of my first of three solo cross-country flights. Last Thursday morning I took a plane up all by myself and did some maneuver practice right north of the town of Maricopa. I did about 10 minutes of slow flight, including turning 360 degrees in each direction, did two power-on and three power-off stalls (the power-on stalls needed work), some S-turns and turns around a point and then flew back and drove off to work. It was a nice way to start a day!

The bad news: I’m opening myself to advice about living with felines versus living with roommates versus living alone. I’ve been living with a cat, Zach, since January. At the end of April two more cats moved in, Simon and Addicus. Individually, none of these cats are bad (though the majority of my readers know my stance on all things feline). However, Simon and Zach do not get along and their strife causes disruptions which range from leaving tufts of hair from the fights to computer equipment being knocked over and stuff getting unplugged (including the phone system). I learned to get along with Zach and deal with the normal things that come along with cats, like their tendency to vomit on important things semi-randomly. The tripling of the cats, however, has left me much less happy. In fact, at times I find myself not wanting to come home to deal with one cat whining about not being able to go outside and the other cat being chased by and hissing at the third. I like things fairly orderly and quiet and I’m having difficulty imposing sufficient order and simply can’t manage the quiet at the times I most want it. Sometimes I pick up my laptop and flee to my room, carefully pirouetting around the briefly-opened door to keep cats from rushing in to hide. It’s been a bit more than six weeks since the cat numbers here tripled and apparently things have gotten remarkably better: Less cat yowling and fewer scratchings and bitings, or something like that. I have difficulty seeing the improvement.

I’m not a cat person. In fact, at this point I would just claim to not be a pet person.

I’ve started looking at places to move; I’ve found several apartments I like and have made a list of favorites. However, I’m not sure I want to live alone; I’m worried that I’ll end up with all of my social interaction occurring at work and just being lonely for a year. I’m now looking for roommate situations to move into, however Chris has pointed out that roommates could well be worse than the cats (which is true). Roommates, however, tend to be trainable. Or I could stay here and try to be less verbally hostile about the cats and deal with the daily annoyances. And no, the cats aren’t budging, so any flexibility must come from me.

I’m not sure what to do. I’m idly checking into roommate opportunities but I don’t want to leave my brother. I could get a nice, big, quiet apartment three miles from work and move in next week, but I don’t want to live alone nor leave my brother. Everything I’m looking at is up in the northern part of the valley, up near work. Chris lives in the south part of the valley, and additionally, my flight training airport is on this side of the valley. I have comfort reasons to stay here another 10 months, but if I do I’m going to have to become numb to the cats somehow.

Other than this, life is good. However, regarding my living situation, this is my solicitation for advice. Please comment below.

Three awesome things just happened. I’ll enumerate first, in chronological order:

First, I soloed Saturday morning! Some pictures my flight instructor took from the ground are up here. Yes, the corner picture has me as the sole occupant of that Cessna 172SP. WOO!

Second, entirely by chance Chris found a Wii Sunday afternoon while shopping at Target and purchased it. Our house now has a Wii, three Wii-motes and some competition brewing over Wii-Tennis and Wii-Bowling!

Thirdly, I just got a birthday present from LIZ! It’s some awesome artwork from Ursula Vernon of a very happy Old One, the one, the only, the Dread: Cthulhu! Oh my gosh, so awesomelycutetotallyneato! Going into frame immédiatement!

So! Soloing!

Saturday morning, wearing a white t-shirt, I went to Stellar Airpark and met my instructor for some touch-and-go practice. It was understood that if I was on the ball that morning and I wanted to, that I would also solo. We took off and Jason (my flight instructor), as is normal these days, leaned back with his hands cushioning his head and said, “Take us to Phoenix Regional, James, then let’s see four touch-and-goes. That number four may be a full stop, we’ll play things by ear.” So I flew us down to Phoenix Regional Airport, flew over midfield and turned into the traffic pattern, ending up a little high on the final approach but did a perfectly fine landing. Jason just reminded me that my downwind leg wasn’t quite parallel to the runway and said, “two more, and then a full stop.” I did two more touch and goes followed by a real to-a-stop landing - my first full stop at an airport other than Stellar, actually (not that slowing down to a stop is very hard).

I pulled off the active runway and taxied back to the “hold short” line, pulled the throttle back to idle and waited. While I had a Zen moment Jason endorsed my logbook and medical for my first solo flight. He gave me some final advice about what to do if I started freaking out while alone in the plane (just in case, I suppose), tuned his hand-held radio, took my camera, shook my hand and shut the door. A minute later I pushed the throttle to the firewall, verified the engine was performing nominally and headed skyward alone! When it was just me in the plane it took off quicker and climbed noticeably faster. I flew the pattern and made two touch-and-goes followed by another full stop landing. They went off splendidly: The first landing saw the winds cooperating. I flared where I should and bumped the plane lightly to the ground on its main gear. My second landing had a crosswind - in the time it took to circle the airport again the wind had shifted 90 degrees and picked up, so landing number two had me tipping my right wing toward the ground to account for the wind. My instructor noted this, of course, and took a picture of my plane in the crosswind attitude, the windsock and his triumphant … grin-thing! Also fun, I did a three-point landing on this touch-and-go. My last solo landing was another full-stop, this time to pick up my instructor who was so kindly taking these photographs from the ground. I dealt with the crosswind again and even better judged my landing point: I put the main gear down either on or really really close to the runway numbers, an age-old landing precision metric.

I picked up Jason, and after he buckled himself back in we taxied back to the runway’s end and headed home. My nerves weren’t shot yet (apparently they should have been, hrmmm) so Jason gave me more work to do on the way back: while I was flying us back the GPS “failed” (Jason turned it off), the radio navigation “failed” (Jason scrambled the controls) and - to make matters worse - my maps and charts “blew out the window” (Jason tossed them in the back seat), so with just my eyes, my compass and my knowledge of the area I had to once again navigate home. He enjoys giving me these exercises, sometimes while also pulling the throttle to idle and telling me the engine failed… I’m sure they’re good for me. Oh yes, the white shirt… There is a tradition among pilots that after your first solo your flight instructor cuts off your shirttails. This dates back to open-air cockpits and the oldest method instructors used to communicate with their students in the pilot’s seat: yanking on their shirttails! Well, I was no different: after we got back to the office and my log book was signed off that I soloed my instructor took a pair of scissors and trimmed my shirt. I get the decorated cloth back after I am awarded my pilot’s certificate.
And now, the Nintendo Wii! So we only have two games, WiiSports that came with the system and RedSteel, a game I bought. Let me put it this way: It came with one controller. Sunday night I bought a second controller so that Chris and I could play at the same time. Monday afternoon I bought a third so Amy could join us. It’s great fun to play Wii-Tennis or Wii-Bowling with these motion-sensing remotes. I just hope the novelty proves to have some staying power, but by all indications it should. Side note: Chris and I are hosting a LAN party here on Saturday and despite 10 people coming over with high-powered computers, we’re wondering whether people are going to end up more interested in the Wii…

Finally, I gots ART! I received this package today from Ursula Vernon and murmured, “Who is this person and why is she mailing me something stiff? And the address is handwritten to me - no mistake about that…” I came in and opened it immediately, wondering what was in my hands. Out slid two pieces of cardboard, between them a sheet of computer paper with my name and address upon it and beneath that… CUTE CTHULHU! I immediately decided it must have been from Liz. I showed it off to Chris and Amy and looked up the artist and was duly impressed - as if the lovely print wasn’t impressive enough! This is being framed lickety-split!

So that’s what I’ve been up to since I got back from Boston last week. Oh yeah, I was in Boston, did I mention it? Oops… Anyway.

Other interesting things: I’m figuring out a time to head back to Florida for a long weekend visit in early August and Stephen is plotting to come out here in two weeks to enjoy the chilly humid air– Wait, Phoenix, not Boston — hot dry air.

Will I blog more? No one can predict…

Another Monday, another work week…

The last two weeks have been lovely; my parents came into town and spent about a week and a half here visiting Chris and I. While much of what we did involved work on the house, we also got out some, too. For example, we returned to the Desert Botanical Gardens (I was there in November after interviewing with General Dynamics). Also, I took my Dad flying.

Quick flight story: My last post was about a failed cross-country flight to Ryan Airpark outside of Tuscon, AZ. Well, my Dad and I went up (with my instructor) to try it again… and failed again! A thunderstorm turned the wrong way compared to its forecast: it headed north and got between us and Tuscon. I wasn’t even that thrilled with flying south (since it looked pretty nasty), but my instructor had me go as far as Casa Grande before diverting to Coolidge. It wasn’t a pretty flight, but it was air time, I had a textbook landing and never got very close to the nasty clouds. Also, my dead reckoning skills checked out for the four checkpoints on my flight plan we passed (e.g., we arrived within 60 seconds of the time I predicted)…. But still, I need to get that cross country done!

Otherwise, life continues. Next things on my agenda are: try to put together a Dungeons and Dragons group, put together a LAN party, bike more and Visit Katie in three weeks.

To make this seem like a slightly more substantial post, here are some links for your entertainment:

• Not only is the title fun, the content is so ludicrous as to nearly bring me to tears. It’s satirical, of course, but it’s worth “Looking Inside” via Amazon: Destined for Destiny: The Unauthorized Autobiography of George W. Bush
  by Scott Dikkers. Also amusing to me is that while 96% of “customers ultimately buy” this book, 4% of those who read this book’s description go on to pre-order Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Hehe. (Speaking of, I haven’t decided if I want to Amazon-order that, or just go to a bookstore on July 21st…)
• Here is an interview with an old-time Lisp guy, Richard Gabriel, who notably is driving several universities to offer Master of Fine Arts degrees in Software Design. Okay, it was a neat and entertaining link for me…

Okay, that’s all for now.

I woke up early this morning, did some preparation and left the house to do some bird hunting, and — yes — I got one. Too bad I was intending to fly to Tuscon!

I did wake up early this morning; I was up at 5:20 and shortly thereafter downstairs getting a weather briefing, writing a navigation log and flight plan in preparation for my second cross country flight, this time to Ryan (KRYN) airport on the western side of Tuscon. On my first cross country flight I didn’t do the whole glut of prep; it was somewhat of a last minute decision to fly to Pinal (KMZJ) right north of Tuscon. Because of that, and because the last trip proved my skill at radio navigation via VORs, I was going to be flying today with nothing but a compass, a clock and my eyes: dead reckoning and pilotage. So I had a very detailed flight plan, a bunch of waypoints and landmarks picked out, all of my wind correction angles calculated and so forth.

I got to the airport at 7:30, ready to depart. My plane didn’t return from its earlier patron until 8:00 so that delayed things a bit, but after preflighting the plane and arranging my maps in the cockpit my instructor and I did our engine test (run-up) and started our takeoff roll.

I kept the plane on the center-line, correcting for the wind across the runway. Engine instruments looked good. I was waiting for the airspeed indicator to reach the plane’s takeoff speed (55 knots) and at the same time watching a pair of birds about to fly across the runway in front of me. The birds were green-colored, flying right-to-left at about head height. I was thinking, “Turn, birds, turn! Climb, birds, climb!” but I must not have been thinking it loudly enough - they hadn’t noticed the danger. I couldn’t swerve the plane around them - planes don’t work like that on the ground. I had used up half the runway already, I probably couldn’t stop the plane before running out of runway and hitting the fence. I was committed to taking off. The plane reached 55 knots right at the time the birds realized the danger and began to climb. Just as the nose-wheel lost contact with the runway, the lower bird went through the full throttle prop.

There wasn’t any noticeable noise in the cockpit, but the windscreen got dirty. I was about 30 feet off the ground, correcting our course to hold us along the runway’s heading when Jason asked the question I didn’t want to hear: “Did we just hit that bird?” I pointed to a mass of tissue and red-yellow fluid in one spot of the windscreen and asked, “Turn around?” Jason replied, “We just had a bird strike, James. Yeah, we want to check that out.” I keyed the radio and said, “Stellar Traffic, Cessna 20519 is turning left crosswind, returning to runway 17. Stellar.”

Immediately a call came back over the radio from the guy behind us in line for takeoff, “Did you guys just hit a bird?” Jason replied, “Affirmative, struck our prop. 519-er is returning home.” They responded, “That’s what we thought - we saw the birds and then we saw this big poof! It looked like it exploded.” Jason: “Yeah, it exploded - all over our windscreen.”

I did a normal landing despite the reduced visibility out the front windscreen due to what-formerly-was-a-bird. We taxied back to the parking area and when I stopped the engine and the propeller stopped spinning we could see yellow nastiness coating the cockpit-facing edge on both blades. On top of that, the windscreen was gooey and the passenger-side wing strut was also slicked with nasty. After the plane was tied town I thought about taking a picture of the mess with my phone but decided that I really didn’t want to look at it again.

The plane looked fine, though, just dirty. Propellers are pretty tough, but bird chunks could have damaged other parts of the plane, so it’s best that we landed it as soon as possible to have maintenance look it over. The bird, however… I think it’s safe to say I ruined its day.

So I didn’t fly to Tuscon today, but I might try that again next weekend while my parents are here. Then, after that I will have pretty much learned the curriculum and the bulk of my remaining hours are going to be flying solo, perfecting my skills in preparation for my check-ride.

So, if I went bird hunting this morning (and scored a kill), does that make this Pug a bird dog?