The Doctor's Lair

...and there she is, right behind me. Her name is November two two two Uniform Mike. The last two letter are UM; off-course that stands for the University of Michigan. Born in 1977, she is a Cessna 152....and yes I flew her for the first time. Check out the University of Flyers website.

Its a long story, but to cut it short, it took quite a while to get the paperwork done. I was hoping to use the summer since there is a little more time then, but what the heck, finally everything is in place. So here is today's story.

The time scheduled for today was from 3 to 6, with a two hour preflight since it was the first time. Quite some time was spent in doing the final paperwork which was setting up a student file in my name among other things. The real education then began with a call to the AFSS( automated flight service station) to get the weather briefing. You basically talk to a weather specialist on the phone and he or she tells you the forecast and other other advisory that they have. This took around 10 minutes with the wait time on the phone. Next came the procedure to check out the aircraft from the club. You have to pick up the file for the aircraft and the keys while shifting a magnetic stickers from the hanger to a flying position. Along with this, you need to check out the plane on the club's website where you go through the plane's maintenance record. And then you head outside to the hanger, slide the hangars doors open and start the preflight. Go over lots of things(probably will cover this in another post later) and then finally tow the aircraft outside. Till this part I was aware of what was going on. Beyond this till we touched back down, everything happened a little quickly. Went through the pre-taxi checklist, started the engine and put on the headsets. Talked to ground control(Brian, my CFI did, he handled the radios), taxied out short of the active runway(24) and did the pre-takeoff checklist. Called from clearance and took off. Learned the correct attitudes and tried to do some level turns. Managed to keep them within 200 feet. Also did some climbs and descends and tried to end up in a level flight. Finally learned the trim tab for hands free flying. All this took a nice part of an hour and we headed back to the airport. Brian handled the landing alone since there was a nice crosswind, maybe next the winds will be favourable and I will get a change to land. We then taxied back to hangars and shut off. The end of the flight was to push the plane back in the hangar and do the glory job of cleaning her up. We did smash a few bugs up there. Before we went in, we called for fuel and the fuel truck came and fueled the 7 gallons that we had burned.

And then came a little more paperwork. Check in the aircraft, pay the instructor and make the entry in the logbook. All of 1 hour. Yahoo!