Did you ever have one of those days?

My day started early. One of my businesses is an automated car wash. It's pretty sophisticated. Sophisticated enough to call me when something is wrong. That's just what it did at 1:30 AM. I got the message, but nobody is washing their car at that time, and I'm not getting out of bed to fix anything either. Turn the phone off, go back to bed, up at 5:00 to head to work and find out what's wrong. I guess that's why I have an engineering degree, so I can fix car washes. My wife thinks it's for changing tires and fixing toilets, but it's really for car washes. Anyway, the problem is a pesky intermittent electrical glitch that I can't solve before I have to leave for Albert Whitted. The machine works most of the time, the rest will have to wait a few hours.

I was unable to schedule my favorite plane, N54058. It was out for maintenance. At Bay Air, I inquired about the nature of the problem. They found a crack in the engine block during a 100 hour inspection. OUCH! A new Lycoming 0-320 runs about $25K. Glad that's not my bill. So I finish my flight plan and Rob shows up and approves it. I pre-flight N54666 and were off, or almost off. I'm doing the engine run-up... 1700 RPM, mag check, left down 50, right down 75, mags OK, carb heat... oops. I pulled the carb heat knob out of the dash. I don't know if the cable was broken, or if the linkage to the carburetor was broken, but we're not taking N54666. Rob heads over to maintenance while I go back to the counter to inquire about another plane.

Good news and bad news. The good new is that N9400L is available. The bad news is that it has no GPS. Well, we are working on VOR navigation today, so we won't be able to cheat with the GPS. By the way, the push to talk on the pilot's yoke doesn't work either. Rob has to make all the radio calls. Being the good instructor, he makes me tell him what to say and when.

I thought I knew all there was to know about VOR navigation. Heck, I have Microsoft Flight Simulator and have "flown" all over the county using the VOR. It works real nice in FSX, not so nice in the real world. I was surprised how high we had to climb to receive the nearby PIE VOR. Rob did not want to fool with class B airspace, so we could concentrate on the VOR. By the time we had the PIE VOR we were almost out from under the class B. We were able to pick up the PGD VOR, and I tracked it to Charlotte County. That's the airport in the pic at top. It's not my pic. I... um... borrowed it from AirNav. I sent them a picture of Albert Whitted, so I guess we're even.

Charlotte County (PGD) was a piece of work. It's an uncontrolled airport, but busier than Whitted. The CTAF was like a party line. Planes were landing and taking off from intersecting runways. We kept our eyes peeled, did a touch and go and got out of there. I'm a new pilot, but Rob was saying "These guys are nuts." Three things I definitely learned to appreciate today were the Garmin GPS, it's traffic system and air traffic control at Whitted. I tracked the PGD VOR back to Parrish, then dead reckoning to Whitted. A nice uneventful ride home.

Back at Bay Air, Rob told me I need to finish my test study guide. I'll finish it in about a week and have a review session with him, then I can schedule and take the test. I'm to plan a solo cross country to Charlotte County and Arcadia (X06). That will be the first new airport I've flown to solo, and will take care of one of the cross country requirements for my license. Next time Rob and I fly, it will be at night. We'll take care of the class B requirement at night. That should be a lot of fun.

lesson 18

You will need google earth to open the lesson 18 file.

Statistics


Dual Instruction Time: 17.9 Hours


Solo/PIC Time: 8.8 Hours


Landings: 94