I Flew

I had a fantastic day yesterday (Sunday).

I woke up late.

Then I hung out with my mom. We had a nice morning, and then drove to visit my mom's friend who lives in a western suburb of Boston. I had already decided that I was going to go for a little run, so I brought all my running stuff with me. I had a gorgeous run through Lincoln (the suburb). It's a bit hilly, so that was different from my usual flat Ohio run, but it was great. I ran by a horse farm, then, I ran by a community farming project thing. The farm was quite cute...there were all sorts of seed beds, and on all the trees around the farm were buckets collecting sap for maple syrup! The only thing that made me kind of sad was that most of the buckets were filled and over flowing. When I was in fourth grade, we tapped trees for sap, and then boiled it down and made Maple Syrup. I think it's something like 40 gallons of sap makes one gallon of syrup. I didn't like seeing the waste. Nevertheless, the run as a whole was bucolic and lovely.
Sap Buckets on a tree.


There is a bike path alongside the road I was running on which would have been great. Would have been great apart from the fact that it had snow and ice all over it.
Running on snow and ice is kind of hellish. It's like jogging through sand. I'm not a fan. I think (hope) that OTS in Alabama will have neither snow nor sand. Though come to think of it, maybe I should practice running on non-pavement surfaces so that I can handle whatever they might throw at me. My pace on pavement was about 9 minutes a mile . My pace once I hit the snow was over 10 minutes a mile. Yikes. I have these fantastic things called Yak Trax that my dad got me for running in wintry weather, but they are unfortunately stuck in a box in Columbus, Ohio, and won't be back in my hands til next weekend. I'm sure if I had them, I would have been able to run much faster. They look like this:











Yak Trax












So then I went to fly! The End.

Just kidding :) I went to Hanscom Air Field, and met my instructor, Mike. He's very nice, and actually a music professor. Instructing flying is his part time job. I played piano for many many years, so I thoroughly enjoy being around other musicians. We had a chat about my goals, and he said he would teach me as if I were going to get my private pilot license and we'd go from there. His schedule seemed pretty flexible too, so that's a bonus. He was very kind, and even knows a retired Air Force pilot who is female, so I asked if he might be able to arrange an email or personal meeting. He has logged a lot of flight hours, loves flying, and comes from a family of pilots.

So at the place that I went to fly (East Coast Aero Club), one can rent from a variety of planes. I chose the most inexpensive one, because...it was the most inexpensive. It also means that this plane is the tiniest. It's a two seater, propeller driven plane called a Tomahawk. Mike said "this is a great plane to learn on. If you can learn how to fly this, you can learn how to fly pretty much anything." Great. So I got a binder for my Tomahawk, and in the front is a big checklist. The first part is all things that you do pre-flight, which I knew would've made my mom and dad happy. We literally checked EVERYTHING on the plane. We checked to make sure all the bolts were secure, we checked the functioning of the ailerons, rudder, and flaps, we checked the fuel gauge inside the plane, and then visually checked the fuel in the tanks on the plane. We took samples of the fuel in three different places to make sure it didn't have air bubbles or was contaminated, we checked the lights on the wing tips and the landing light. We checked the brakes, and lifted up the cowling to check the engine too. Apparently airplane engines are a little redundant: they have 2 spark plugs for every cylinder, two fuel tanks, and two electrical contacts. The reason for this is in case something fails in the air, the other one will kick in and everything will work normally. As Mike said, "When you're in a plane, you can't exactly pull over on the side of the road and fix something."

So then we got in, buckled our seatbelts, put on our head phones and started up the plane. The interior looked exactly like my AFOQT study guide said it would, which was actually kind of nice and comforting.

On the ground, one steers an airplane solely with their feet on the rudder pedals (it moves the back of the tail and thus the nose from side to side). It definitely took me a little time to get used to it, and I'm not even going to pretend I'm proficient in it. I can't wait to practice more. After a bunch of pre flight checks, we went to the runway and took off. Taking off, as you might imagine, is pretty fun. We put the throttle on about 1600 RPMs, which makes the plane move very fast down the runway. Then, we pulled back on the steering column and were up!

I practiced a bit of climbing, level flight, turns, etc. Turns are interesting because when you put a plane in a turn, it just stays there. You need to counteract the turn by "turning" in the opposite direction to fly level again. I feel like I'm not describing this too eloquently, but hopefully with more practice I will. We did a stall, and Mike showed me how one can still fly an airplane even with the engine cut out. He did a bunch of steep diving turns to see how I handled it, and it was fine. It felt like the plunge on a roller coaster or a dive. I actually like that feeling very much, I kind of wanted to do it more :)
It was beautiful up there. Since it was about 4pm, the sun was setting, and it was gorgeous. We could see Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire and Mt. Wachusett in Massachusetts. When we turned around to land again, I could see the city of Boston bathed in golden sunlight. We even flew through a teeny patch of snow which was pretty cool. Seeing the snow on the ground was very beautiful as well.

I have a LOT to learn still. My first homework is to learn the NATO Phonetic alphabet so that I can talk to the Air Control tower. This is the alphabet.

I also have to read the first 3 chapters of an FAA book, which is fortunately available online for free, so that's great. Alright, I'll wrap up this post with a photo of me in front of the teeny plane I flew. Yay!