Ground School

I didn't get much flying done today. I got to Bay Air a few minutes before Rob did. When he walked in, I knew there was a problem. His back had been giving him trouble and he was in a lot of pain. Initially, I was upset about not flying today, but after a little more thought I realized that with my 2.8 hours of flying experience I did not want to find myself flying the plane if he was incapacitated.

We had planned on a little ground school time today before our flight, so at least the trip to St. Pete was not completely wasted. Rob wanted me to have a good grip on aerodynamics before we went much further. Now, I'm an engineer by education. I know about thermodynamics, fluid dynamics and some other dynamics. What we went over was aerodynamics lite. In school, every time I studied something that had dynamics in it's name you could be sure there was lots of math involved. No math today, and that's just fine with me. The idea is just to have a grip on the forces acting on the plane and the principles that make it fly. Enough said.

We did talk about what was coming up next in our flight sessions. Power on stalls, steep turns, ground reference maneuvers and landings. Lots of landings getting ready to solo. I'm going to try to get a flight in Saturday. Weekends in the fall are tough for me. My youngest son plays football on Friday nights, so we are out sort of late. I usually feel the effects of that on Saturday.