Students, wax jobs, and rain...

Woah, its been a busy week. I can't believe I've not written for so long. I've had several students and spent 18+ hours detailing a twin Cessna 310. Yeah. It has a huge surface area, and was really dirty with bad stains, but I got it cleaned (Meg helped for a few hours Monday), and I waxed the entire thing. I haven't had time to catch my breath, much less write.

The high point of the week was when I had the same student two days in a row. I flew with Dr. Lee on Sunday and Monday mornings. It was really cool to be able to work with a student more than once, and to see him learn. I found that he is a really fast learner while we sat having an informal ground lesson on Monday while waiting for the fog to lift. The two lessons were geared toward slow flight and stalls - I really think I got the intended skills across, and I really tried hard to get him to feel the plane, to really get a sense for how it flys. These two exercises are used primarily to teach real-world feel for angle of attack. Lee was able to fly right at minimum controllable airspeed like he had been doing it for years - the holy grail of an "immediate stall upon further increase in pitch or reduction of power" was exactly where he was by the end of lesson 4!

It feels really good to be able to teach someone something like this, and he really enjoyed his time with me (at least, thats what he said).

I had considered taking the offer to fly the jump plane for the parachute jumpers, but the flight school told me that as long as I worked for them, I wouldn't be allowed to fly commercially for anyone else. I didn't realize this was a condition, and its OK for now. If good opportunities come along or I don't get enough work with them, however, then I'll have to consider other options. For now, I'm very happy to stay with them - they have done some favors for me, to say the least.

Right now we are in the middle of a 4-day rain, so the flying has been a bit slow (read: it hasn't happened since Monday). I'm hoping that, as the weekend rolls along and the sun comes out. I'll get back into the thick of things, but tomorrow I'm going to take a nice day of rest before starting the wash job on a Cessna 210 that is in the shop.