First flying lesson

I had planned the first flying lesson for today, between work and the ground class. After having had great weather for a couple of weeks (or something), a cold front suddenly moved in just an hour before the lesson. I observed that it was moving quite fast, so I went to to the flying club for my lesson anyway.

On arriving there, the rain started pouring again, so we had to wait for half an hour before we decided that the weather was good enough for a short lesson. We made a quick inspection round of the plane, and fueled it. Then we were set to go.

Since I already have some flying experience (about 75 hours gliders and a couple of hours in Piper PA-28:s) we skipped the most basic stuff, like the basic functions of the different control surfaces. Instead we focused more on the differences between gliders and aircraft with engines. One notable difference is that the rudder pedals are much less used here. I also tried some climbing and descending turns, turns with various banking angles, keeping the altitude with different levels of thrust etc.

The lesson lasted for approximately half an hour, which was about half of what was planned. There was only time for one landing, especially since we had to wait for some birds to leave the runway before we could start our final approach.

The air was quite turbulent and windy today, so it became a bumpy ride. Not that I have any problems with that, but it wasn't the best opportunity to try my first landing. thus the instructor helped me a little with the controls starting a hundred feet above the ground (Argh! After holding down a shift key for too long; Windows decided that I"m disabled and not allowed to use my shift keys; so now I"m in some weird caps locked mode; and cannot type any digits; commas or other non_shifted keys)

(I couldn't find any way to get rid of that silly keboard mode, so I moved to my Linux computer instead. Guess I'll have to reboot the Windows box.)

After the flying lesson I went directly to ground class. Today's subject was radio communications. We were just three students there today. One has already dropped off, one didn't have time, and I don't know where the last guy was.

I will summarize costs and logged time in another posting.