Had our first official casualty of the course today. He wasn't sure about doing the pilot thing in the first place, and after a few flights here, he found out it just wasn't his thing. I've got a lot of respect for him because he studied is butt off, did great on the tests and had no problems in the plane. He gave a 100% effort and figured out it just wasn't for him. He's on the road now, headed home, and his base is working to find him another job, no hard feelings.

Down to 27...

Had my third flight today. Everything went great again, had a blast. Finally got that sight-picture down for the steep turns, but need a touch more rudder control coming out of the stalls. We did a bunch of forward-slips into a landing, and another no-flap landing. Maybe I'm imagining things, but I'm a big guy with big feet, and I felt like my boot was catching on something while putting in that boot-full of rudder for the slips, preventing me from putting in full rudder. Oh well, I'll work on it...

Flying again tomorrow, but with a different IP this time. They like you to have experience with at least one other IP, but if you get too many different IPs, they start looking at it as a disadvantage for the student. They want at least some continuity. My guy tomorrow is a former Marine too!! (civilan now) We joked that we could throw in the occasional "KILL!!!" after our radio calls!

Went and bought a gas grill with some class money today. We'll leave it here so all you future classes can use it. We're gonna grab some beer and have the kitchen give us some burgers to burn tomorrow evening. Should be a good time! The weather's been great. Some rain, but a lot of sunshine otherwise, with morning temps around 45 and climbing to the mid 80's in the afternoon.

This place ain't so bad at all!! As long as you study your stuff and are prepared to fly, everyone is pretty cool! For those of you soon to come here, don't expect people screaming at you and a lot of mickey-mouse B.S. They teach you what you need to know, and expect you to study it enough to remember it, that's it!! Seems reasonable, and I've definitely been in worse...

Some more reccomendations:

1: If you can get a hold of a helmet bag, they're very nice to haul your books to the classroom and you're stuff to the plane.

2: If you want to bring your own headset, you can, they use the standard GA plug-ins. They have very nice Dave Clark headsets on the plane for you, though, so don't go buy a cheap headset before you come. If you have an ENC (Electronic Noise Cancellation) headset though, I would reccomend you bring that. I love mine!!

3: If you're a picky sleeper, bring a queen-size foam pad to put on top of the bed, and maybe your own pillows if you don't like the hotel-style ones. If you use their pillow cases, they'll change them out for you.

4: A lot of people brought contact-paper to "laminate" some of the charts and checklists. They like it, but I haven't seen the need.

5: I was able to print off new copies of the checklists and cut them down to fit in the "nice" plastic sleeves, and I like it. Supposedly if you spray hairspray on the paper pages first, the print won't transfer to the inside of the plastic sleeves. Neat trick!

6: Bring a camera. Take lots of pictures. If you want pictures while in-flight, do it on your first ride. That's your real freebie. All the rest of the flights you'll probably be too busy to ask the IP to take the controls while you make like a tourist.

That's about it for now, I'll post more as I think of them!

Later!