Saturday, July 12th

"Hotter'n donut grease," my lead instructor Matt remarks with his native Kansas twang.

It's 102 degrees here in the Dallas area, which means that it's about 122 on the concrete/asphalt surfaces of the airport. There's only one good thing about heat like this... my preflight inspection goes faster and better, because I just can't wait to start that huge fan in front of me.

Lucky for me, my first flight today started at 0800, when the thermometer merely read 90. Did a steep turn maneuver before heading out to Mid-Way Airport again for touch-and-goes. Did 9 of them over 2 hours with a moderate crosswind. After #5 or so I started nailing the landing checklist procedures and a perfect glideslope on final. Working on fighting the urge to float too far down the runway before landing, but I understand landing requires the most finesse of nearly any flight maneuver, so I'm trying not to beat myself up too bad about it. Sean's handling the radio calls during the pattern work (uncontrolled airport, so we gotta call out our position all the time), but I'm gonna try to take that over tomorrow.

Afternoon flight was interesting. Sean and I headed southwest to do more maneuvers. Slow flight, stalls, more steep turns, and some new ground maneuvers... precision steep turns around a fixed point on the ground, S-turns along a road, and rectangle patterns... all while maintaining altitude. Sean took the next one. Emergency landing was next, which involved cutting the power and spiraling slowly down to find a good landing area. Found a freshly-mowed obstacle-free hayfield below us and got down low enough to where I really thought we might actually land. Exercise over... full power, flaps up, climb out. Yeehaw.

During that slow spiral down, I looked down from about 1000ft and spotted our plane's shadow on the ground, then a similar plane's shadow right next to it. Wait... either we've developed another sun, OR...

It was Matt and classmate Mike... about 1000 feet above us, doing similar maneuvers. We were calling out our position to the area and got calls from other aircraft, but got no answer from them. Later they told us that they made several attempts to call us, so we were deaf to each other for some reason. Nobody's pointing fingers... and they were watching us the whole time.

A note about yesterday... instructor Mikey says that the incipient spin wasn't caused by wind, but by a rudder overcorrection on his part. Another note... I botched that flight's radio call for taxi request... "Arlington Ground, Cessna 7265 Zulu at the main ramp, request taxi to the main ramp with weather". WINCE. GROAN. Request taxi to the runway, rookie. The nice encouraging men in the tower that I met the other day are now laughing their asses off at me but spared me the shame of broadcasting it. I didn't make that mistake today and probably won't again for a while.

Cold front coming in tomorrow, which is expected to drop the temp about 10-12 degrees and shift the winds enough to reverse the pattern at the airport, meaning we'll be taking off to the north on runway 34 instead of to the south on the usual 16, if thunderstorms don't ground us completely. Stay tuned!

Weekends? What weekends?