It's Been Awhile

Clearly, I haven't posted on here in a long time. My last post was last year. Oops... The North Dakota winter presented itself as a problem in an already turbulent situation.

I decided I don't want to fly for a living. I'd rather fly for fun, when I want to, and not have to prepare so much for a simple flight within the area. But, because I still want to keep flying as a hobby, albeit an expensive one, I need to finish my Private Pilot flight training. Seeing as how I do not want to fly for a living, I took a somewhat casual approach. I'm not saying I approach my training itself casually, not in the least bit. But when it comes to scheduling it's nice to take some time off. So I became "choosy" when it came to scheduling and when I got canceled for some reason, I didn't think much of it.

Now comes the North Dakota winter. When I wanted to fly and I had a scheduled launch time, the weather conditions were more often than not bad enough to prevent any flying. Snow storms, low cloud cover, and the worst of all...high winds. Whenever it was nice and sunny out with clear skies, you'd think it was a nice day to fly. But then I thought, what pushed that bad weather out so fast? Oh yeah! Wind. Since coming back to UND after semester break, I had flown one flight up until today. I had yet to do my review flight before I left for break, but decided to do it when I came back since I'd have to do another one anyway since it would've been a long time since I had flown last. I flew that flight, but needed to do it twice because of the timespan since the previous flight. I never got the second flight in.

Because it's been awhile since I got that one flight, my first of the year 2009, I got reset to having to do two review flights.

I just flew the the first today...after having been canceled on Friday due to clouds, Saturday due to clouds, Sunday due to high winds. Oh yeah! And Monday due to high winds. Today was windy, but not bad enough to keep me from flying. The wind pushed me around a bit during my Ground Reference maneuvers; I wasn't able to keep my turns around a point and S-Turns with perfect arcs. The wind pushed me around and tightened or pushed out my turn, but I did well to compensate.

I flew well for not having flown in 3 months...exceedingly well, even with our aircraft's problems. Oh yeah, we had problems. Firstly, my instructor took the inside pre-flight while I took the outside. She came out to inform me that our right fuel gauge was inop (inoperable), but it was placarded correctly and shouldn't prevent a problem since it was a backup anyway. No big deal.

So we're off in the air flying around nicely performing my turn around a point. I didn't get to complete that full 360 degree turn. My instructor yanked the controls back to level. I glanced back into the cockpit and saw the MFD (Multi-Functional Display) on my side was black with red X's in places where my instruments should've been displayed. We're taught to look outside the cockpit while flying and, during the turn, to use the nose of the aircraft and the horizon as my reference to whether or not I'm loosing or gaining altitude, glancing inside the cockpit only for quick references that the instruments are all reading correctly and there's nothing wrong. Well, the last time I had checked inside the cockpit they were fine. The system came back online. In normal cockpits with analogue gauges the instruments are all separate from each other. But in a Glass cockpit aircraft the instruments are all displayed on the screen (except for the few backups) and the system which runs it, ARHS, had apparently quit on us for a bit.

It came back online and reset itself quicky. My instructor reasoned that maybe one of us received a call or text message on our cell phones because she had that happen once where her whole screen went blank and she saw later that she had missed a call. When I was leaving the airport I checked my phone quick. Thankfully I did not have any missed calls or text messages, though I didn't see my instructor check her phone after the flight. This completely proves that the Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel are wrong. They proved that phones do not interfere with aircraft. We at UND have proved that wrong multiple times. I received an e-mail from one of the Lead Flight Instructors here warning us all about turning off our cell phones for our flights because he had just been alerted off a situation with someone else who had a problem in flight and their navigation equipment went out for a few minutes. My instructor told me she had it happen to her once before, and now I personally have experienced it. We didn't need to report it, but it makes me wonder how many others have the same thing happen to them and don't need to report it.

We decided to head back to Grand Forks after that just to be safe, since my instructor also heard a rattling throughout the flight, as did I, and she finally determined it to be the engine cowling. Yeah, no problem at all... Heading back into Grand Forks my instructor said we'd push our luck and try for 1 or 2 stop-n-go landings. I was fine with it. It wasn't likely that our engine cowling would pop open in mid-flight and even if it did everything is secure within the engine compartment that nothing would fly out. We'd just have some added drag and a nice obstruction in our view point. Being creative, I bet if that happened I could use that to line myself up with the runway better. The cowling opens up longitudinally along the aircraft so if I looked down it and set the end down the center of the runway I'd be lined up. But that would be totally unnecessary.

We only did one stop-n-go landing before my instructor decided we should head in for good.

It felt good to be back up in the air again. Now, can I finish this within 3 weeks? I only have 5 more flights after my second review flight, hoping I don't unsat any checkrides. My money is on that I do finish within that time frame. Calm winds and blue skies!