So I had my solo today, along with about 5 other guys. It was a blast. You have to do all your solo landings to a full stop then taxi back to the runway, but it's not a big deal. The problem comes in when you FORGET to do your full stop and just do a touch-and-go! Enter me... they understood that you build the habit patterns based on touch-and-go's, but they were still pissed after I told them about it (no one knew, the IPs were driving to the tower to watch us when I did it!). Oh well, the called me a dumbass and that was the end of it (tower had actually cleared me for the option).

I went on my next flight in the syllabus this afternoon too. The IP was a former F-15 driver, and about scared the crap out of me!! We were doing stalls, and he tells me, "I don't want you to go to the buffet, I want you to go to loss of control." For those of you non-flyers, when doing stall practice, you normally (in the civilian world) go until the plane starts shaking (the buffet). He wanted me to keep going. So I was doing a turning-to-the-right, power-on stall, felt the buffet, then the plane flipped on me!! The right wing immediately fell to about 90-100 degrees of roll and then the nose then dropped to about 60-70 degrees nose down. I pulled out of it no problem, but about crapped my pants! He tells me, "Nice job, it looked good!" Are you flippin' kidding me? The least he could have done would have been to brief me about it ahead of time!!

My next interesting experience was back in the pattern. We were doing a no-flap landing and he tells me. "Keep pulling the nose up to keep it off the runway, and we'll have a nice landing." I've heard this before, so it made sense. This time, though, during the flair, he keeps saying, "Pull it back, pull it back..." So I do, and have a perfect landing... along with the tail of the aircraft. He asks if I heard the the tail drag, and I told him I'd rather not say what I heard! He asks again seriously, and I tell him that yes, I think I dragged the tail for half a second. He says no big deal, it was a very minor scrape if we did, don't worry about it. So after landing, he looks at it, says sure enough we did, but didn't do any damage (there's a piece back there designed for that).

So that was my crazy flying day!! I have two more flights tomorrow, then they are having me skip two flights and go straight to final check. I should be done Wenesday, then get to go home Saturday. Everyone else gets to go home as soon as they finish, but they want to "keep the class leader around". Oh well...