I am proud to announce that I have completed my first official flight lesson as a Flying Musician Ambassador! Between 5 and 7pm EST, I went up in a Cessna 172 (tail number N420U) from my local airport in St. Mary’s County. My CFI and I flew around the area and reviewed stall recovery, steep turns, and landing which are the areas that I am currently working on.
This past summer, I had a brief run in with a spin where I did the almost unforgivable and tried altering the ailerons while in a power on stall. That experience made it rather stressful to complete steep turns and stall recovery practices, but with the help of my CFI I had much less trouble today with those things, and I am even exited to practice them more so that I can fully overcome this obstacle!
Below I have attached some pictures I took today from the plane! (Everything looks more beautiful in a plane)
Tomorrow, I am to go up again first thing in the morning. I look forward to updating you on my flight tomorrow!
Musical Update
Tomorrow is Memorial Day. In honor of Memorial Day, my brother and I participate in Taps Across America, where musicians across the country play Taps at 3pm local time in honor of those who gave their life for our country. I will be participating on the flute with my brother on the clarinet, as we play in honor of our own family members who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Anyone can participate in Taps Across America. If you are interested in playing Taps in your community in honor of our soldiers, first register on the Taps Across America website linked below, then grab your horn and join us! You do not need a sanctioned event or an audience, just an instrument and a location.
Hello everyone! This is Lauren Compton posting from Southern Maryland. First things first, a big thank you to the board and to Mr. John for giving me this amazing opportunity. I look forward to keeping you all updated on my progress!
Flight
I was introduced to flying as a new member of Civil Air Patrol two years ago. After completing my orientation flights, I became aware of Aim High Flight Academy, which is sponsored by the US Air Force. Being selected to attend Aim High was an amazing opportunity! We attended ground school and flew nearly every day during the three-week program.
Currently, I am in the process of beginning my journey to solo with Piedmont Flight Center in St. Mary’s County Maryland, where my CFI thinks I can be ready to solo in about 10 hours because of my previous experience. At the moment, I have a total of 18.9 flight hours, mostly in the Cessna 172, through my completion of the Aim High Flight Academy and some added experience through Civil Air Patrol.
Speaking of Civil Air Patrol, I just achieved my Billy Mitchell award! For those of you that don’t know, the Mitchell award represents a CAP cadet completing half of the program and has been awarded to only 12% of all cadets!
Below I have inserted a few pictures and a link to the speech I gave when I was presented with my award!
Music
In terms of music, I just completed my high school flute journey with a superior rating at state solo and ensemble, playing Chaminade’s Concertino- the same piece my mother played in her senior year of high school. I could not have hoped for a better conclusion to my high school flute career! Below is a video of me performing at my flute teacher’s recital, and a picture of my brother and me with our certificates!
The week prior to solo and ensemble, my school band held our spring concert on Thursday evening in which I performed as Principal flute. During the same week, I sang Out Here on My Own from Fame in my school’s (very casual) senior coffee house. Below I have attached video links for both.
As for harp, I recently performed at a Mother’s Day Tea for one of the local churches. It was such an honor to be invited back, as I also played for this event last year. Next week, I’ll be playing at a local senior center. If you’d like to see that performance, please check out my Facebook page, harptunesandtales, to learn about my playing and my non-profit organization titled Tunes and Tales.
Sharing music at so many local venues brings me great joy and has brought me closer to the people in my community! I would love to hear about your musical journey – please feel free to share!
See you soon!
Thank you all so much for your encouragement and support. I look forward to keeping you updated as my journey unfolds.
It felt so amazing and so weird at the same time! Not having my CFI next to me gave me a sense of independence in the aircraft and gave me a huge boost of adrenaline when flying. It went great, although I thought I could’ve done better on my landings, 3 in total, but I’ve heard that if you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing.
I hope that this chapter is the first of many and I can’t wait to share my future accomplishments.
I don’t have good pictures because I forget when I’m focusing on the lesson, so I usually get one before my preflight.
My CFI and I have been working on my takeoffs and landings so that I can solo. I’ve done two lessons working on them and so far, my approaches have been significantly improving but I am still perfecting the final flare when I am about to touchdown. This aspect has been a little bit of a struggle, mostly because I believe I am focusing on the runway right ahead of me instead of looking down the runway as most people encourage to look there instead. I do have better touchdowns when I remember to look down the runway, but I will just have to keep working at it and develop an “eye” for my touchdowns.
I’ve been kinda slacking on posting my flights that I have been doing but I’ll get you all brought up to date on them.
I’m still trying to perfect my landings to be able to solo but my CFI and I went to KGRI (Class D Airspace) and I worked on my communications with a tower.
Then later in the week, we scheduled the same flight again, but instead of my CFI doing the planning and helping me determine the cruising altitude and runway to use I did all of that and it was pretty amazing being able to make a plan then execute it exactly like it was made up.
I’m hopefully going to solo pretty soon so I’ll keep you guys updated on that!!
On the 29th of June, I held my very first Hangar Jam! I’ve been busy flying and working so I couldn’t get this posted sooner. It was awesome to play in front of a crowd and spread the light of aviation and music. I’ve been getting a few more hours in the seat and am starting to become more fluent with the controls and getting more proficient in maneuvers.
On Saturday I was given the opportunity to fly in my first Skyhawk 152. He is a member of the AAA (Antique Airplane Association) and wanted to take me up and fly me to my flight lesson. It was my first flight lesson with my new instructor. It was kind of a hard cross wind but it was a good time. It was great to get back in the seat and get some hours!
Hi all! I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the warmer spring weather. In February and March, my flight training was placed on hold because of my health. I had an ear infection and bad stomach/digestive issues and therefore was forced to tend to myself rather than fly. As a result, I became rusty. I forgot how to execute steep turns and stalls properly, among other maneuvers that I was well versed in just weeks ago.
Finally, after three months, I am much healthier. I can consistently weight train to my liking in the gym, and I have found great additional health benefits in going to the sauna every day and adopting a regimen of supplements. I have also had one flight since.
All this is to say, that health is paramount in aviation. Without a healthy body, nothing is possible. Fight training takes discipline in scheduling out days to a lot for flights, studying, and ground classes. Additionally, it also takes discipline in taking care of your body and treating it as if it were a high-performance car. If you fuel your body with bad fuel and neglect to care for it by exercising, your body will not perform well, and vice versa. Flight training is so much more than flying!
Here is what I did to turn around my health (I hope this can help someone who is looking for ways to improve theirs too):
-Sleep early (sleep is everything, our body recovers during sleep, and sleep changes the chemistry of our brain and body)
-supplement regimen including multivitamins, vitamin C, and more
-weight training at the gym every day
-daily sauna sessions for 15-25 minutes at or around 290 degrees Fahrenheit
I have some pretty exciting things in the works that I wanted to share. Towards the beginning of the last semester, I made a friend who was also interested in aviation, and had a PPL. Her name is Elisa, I think I may have mentioned her in a post awhile back. It was so cool to meet another person in the same boat as I, struggling to fit flying into the busy-ness of Vanderbilt. I asked her if she knew anyone else in the flying community at college, and she said that she did know a few people, but we both yearned to have a bigger sense of community. In college we’re supposed to find our place, our people, and we felt like this was part of it.
Eventually we came up with the idea of an aviation club, like all the other clubs on campus. We realized that there had been an aviation club at Vanderbilt, but it didn’t exist anymore.
It was really fascinating trying to figure out what they did and what happened through their old Facebook page and through online searching. They did everything from Discovery Day’s, getting a lot of members to go on discovery flights to bringing in professionals from the aviation community. The club eventually died out due to lack of interest and the university not liking the idea of professors flying students. It was cool to see that something like this had existed at the school.
We reached out to others including someone who used to be part of the old aviadores and threw around ideas of making a club and how trying to make it an official club could affect what we do.
Eventually we met up with a few other students who were pilots who were willing to invest their time into this idea. I enjoyed meeting them and hearing their stories of how they got into aviation and where they are now. It made me appreciative of how we were all on our own timelines of getting licenses.
The next step was to take action and to make this idea on paper a reality. We created a group chat and the interested pilots asked around if anyone they knew would want to join. We made a few posters and hung them up around school. That’s all it took. From that we had a whole community of interested people and a time and place to meet.
I was slightly nervous for the meeting, but excited as well — seeing something finally turn into fruition of our planning and goals. There were about 20 people who showed up, so we had a mostly filled classroom. The original pilots who took on this idea (including me) went around and introduced ourselves and we talked about our goals for this club. We want to eventually set up a mentor program where students get matched with each other to give advice about where they are in their process of becoming a pilot and getting their licenses. Afterwards, there was a good amount of people who wanted to stay a little while and introduce themselves. It was nice meeting so many people interested in aviation and learning about their stories.
There were all sorts of friendly people who showed up. There were two guys in the back who also were pilots as a job. We asked them about details. They were visiting town and walking around campus when they came across some of the posters we put up and decided to come. They are survey pilots who are also building their hours. I thought this was just a testament how aviation can bring people together.
I am so happy that all of our collective ideas were able to come together to create a community, even if it is right now only a group of people who have a shared interest of aviation. I can’t wait to make it more and create experiences together.
That’s all for now,
Jovie
this is our in progress logo that I have been working on. I’m thinking I need to add more color
Unfortunately, the weather has not been the best lately, so I have not been able to go flying. I’m going to talk more about music at some point in time, but first I wanted to talk about how I’ve really seen music become more connected with my other interests. I signed up for this short, 1 month long, intro to mechanical engineering class, going in with very little expectations. Turns out that it is a project-based class and that the goal of the class was to build an instrument out of household materials. How cool is that?
This project stemmed out of when classes were online the past few years and engineering had to be implemented from a variety of different places. What a better way to get more creative and resourceful than using household materials to build a project?
It took me forever to come up with what type of instrument I even wanted to build out of everything imaginable and possible. Within that I did some research that I’m sure people are interested in. I came across the question of, what even is music at its very core? And one response to it was this piano piece called 4’33” by John Cage and in the same vein the Monotone Silent Symphony. I would encourage you to look it up if you don’t already know about it. If you don’t have the time, it’s basically a whole piece where the performer doesn’t play a single note on the instrument, but sits there in silence, and the music that is made comes from the audience’s reaction. It’s the whole idea of how silence is just as important as everything else in music and how music is a performance. Around the same time, I saw a poem my classmate from high school wrote who goes to a music college that relates very well. He talked about how in music “space has power too” and how “maybe you have to write 99 notes to realize the power of 3.” I don’t know, I think that’s just speaking to me right now, how intentional we can be with the littlest things in music. What do y’all reading this think? And do you have a really strong opinion of what music is or can be at its core?
Anyways, I decided on making a kalimba, aka a sanza, aka a thumb piano. The kalimba originates from the mbira instrument out of Eastern and Southern Africa. The kalimba consists of a wooden board, usually with a resonator, with attached (metal) tines that are constructed to create different pitches when struck/plucked by fingers.
At first I had no idea what type of materials I could come up with from living my very simple college dorm life. But, with some time, ideas came up. At college, they often give out these metal water bottles, basically like 1 use plastic bottles, but metal. I can add in a picture for reference. So, I wanted to do something with them because I had access to them. I decided to take my kid scissors that I brought with me to college and see what I could do. In the end, I just cut flat strips and realized that I could make noise with them. Thus, a thumb piano.
The kalimba I made is composed of different length tins strategically placed on top of a bridge that is held together by a sound box. The materials I used for this are a small 22 x 6 x 1.5cm box, a hair tie, and strips of metal cut from a water bottle found in the recycling bin. The hair tie acts like a bridge: part of the metal goes under it once and over it the second time. Changing the length of the tin from the second hair tie to its end changes the frequency that the tin resonates.
Now, this is where my project turned into more engineering, because right where I left off was nowhere near being done. My instrument had to be tunable and it had to be part of a band of other homemade instruments.
The tuning process was rather difficult. To make a long story short, most of the different ways I tried to tune the instrument did not work because the devices I was using could not pick up the frequency of the kalimba when the sound was not constant, but rather plucked. My solution to this was to set up a drone on my phone or a different device and use my ear to match the kalimba to that pitch.
I have attached below, pictures of my instrument and the song that my group decided to play together. I hope you enjoy!
-Jovie
I made the Kalimba on the bottom left. Can you guess the song that we played?
