Tuesday, December 2nd

Forgot to mention...

I spent Election Day moving out of the Grand Courtyard apartments and into an apartment at ATP. Since my roomies were all graduating at a record rate, and not much in the way of new blood coming in, the ATP brass closed the apartment and moved me into a studio on the first floor of the school, which I'm sharing with flight partner Dan. Not bad, really... the commute to school's great (one flight of stairs) and there's a flight simulator in the backyard. Free coffee, too.

Just finished day 6 of CFI (certified flight instructor) school. All the horror stories I've heard over the months from my friends and roomies are mostly true... it's an immense load of reading, comprehension, quizzing, correlation, and some flying. The CFI 'initial', the checkride done by the local Flight Standards District Office in Fort Worth, is first up and will involve a rather lengthy oral exam, covering everything I've learned, but this time at from the standpoint of an instructor... not just the 'whats', but also the 'whys' and 'hows'. If I'm gonna be teaching it, I'd better know it, right?

Got re-acquainted with an old friend today... the Cessna C172 Skyhawk. It's a requirement of CFI candidates to be signed off as being proficient in stall awareness and spin recovery, so today's the day that asst. chief pilot Javier and I went up to try our best to crash a plane by going vertical. You may recall that in my early stage of private pilot training, we accidentally put one into a spin during a stall maneuver, which looked something like this (not my video!)...



This time we did it on purpose. And what do you know... it was a hell of a lot of fun! We did three of them before heading over to Mid-Way Airport to meet flight partners Mike and Dan for their turn, and they were just as giddy. Dan even got into a few fully-developed spins, where the plane made several complete rotations before recovery. I can't wait to practice these again on my own someday.

Anyway, that was my day. Final day of ground school is tomorrow, to be followed by as much self-paced study as my little ol' noggin can handle. Still no word on my checkride dates, but that should be coming in the next few days. The end is nigh at hand...