Up, Up and Away !

I booked a flight for Saturday morning with one of the new instructors at the flying school for a check out flight. It seems that since the school has added some additional staff my old instructor Dave no longer works weekends.

I've never been flying with Greg before but he always seemed to be a pretty easy going with a good sense of humor. I preflighted the aircraft and when Greg arrived we fired her up and finished up the preflight checks. During the magneto checks one of the spark plugs turned out to be fouled and it took a few extra minutes on the apron running Fern leaned out at a high power setting before she burned off the carbon deposits.

We took off and did a few circuits, it was a nice day and rather busy with two of the school's students in the pattern with us, us in the 172 and them in a 150 or 152. We ran our circuits a little larger than normal to account for the small differences in speed. We then departed to the training area located to the north east and did some upper air work review, my slow flight was text book bang on. Did some stalls and steep turns and finally we returned to the airport and did a crosswind landing on the inactive for practice. Greg was cool with me using my preferred crab method.

When then joined the active circuit and my final landing of the day was unusually "firm". Greg commented that, "at least we know we're down". I said something about how that sucked a big one.

As we were taxiing back to the apron Greg said that everything was great and he'd sign me off so that I now have my rental privileges back.

I'm looking forward to the summer... if it ever arrives on the East coast.