First Dual Instruction Hour

Hi All,

I survived my first hour of dual instruction! It was a bit more nerve racking than I anticipated. I have had past experience flying the airplane from the right seat with family members, growing up with a family chuckfulla aviators. The cockpit is a familiar environment for me. People often are confused in the cockpit at first from all the stimuli whirling around you and cramming through all your senses. That wasn’t what was so nerve racking to me, since I understood what was going  on, and it was just the usual. What made me so fidgety was the fact that I am going through a more intense version of drivers training again. We all remember the first time taking the reigns of a car for the first time, whether it be at 15 or at 6 years of age 😉 and the nerves that come with it, especially when there is somebody next to you correcting your bad technique, which there were plenty of at the time. You all know a version of the feeling that somebody is watching for errors, and how it makes you second guess everything. For example, when he says set your heading to 270, I suddenly can’t find the  hiding in plain sight heading indicator. By the end of the hour I was perfectly fine however (composure wise).

My instructor is a very friendly, and what you might call, an ol’ timer, which I respect him for. I noticed very quickly that he has a fantastic reservoir of knowledge that he is more than willing to share, especially if you ask 😉

Unfortunately, we were dodging storms, so I didn’t have time to take a nice cheesy picture of my first dual instruction with an excessive, perhaps overexcited grin… Instead, I posted a picture with my slick new FMA shirt, which makes up for my ugly face 😉 next to my newly built 1/2 Volkswagen Ultralight engine. I know, unrelated, but I had to share it since I spent the last year building it from scratch, and tend to be quite a bit proud of the ol’ girl. If you are wondering, “what do you mean 1/2?!” Just look it up, it is half of a 4 cylinder (now 2) aircooled volkswagen engine converted for ultralight aircraft. It will be running soon, so if anyone would like to see a video of that, I suppose I can figure out how to post that somehow…