NIFT is so nifty!

The young man stared at the expanse of pavement in front of him. It seemed to stretch nearly to the horizon, with the heat rising off it making the distant areas blur and wave to his eyes. Suddenly, the young man is jolted back from his subconscious by an authoritative voice in his ear. "Cessna 1581Romeo, you are cleared for takeoff." Suddenly his mind was ajumble with a million things at once. Calmly in his other ear came the voice of his instructor. "Release the brakes, throttle to full, right rudder to compensate for left turning tendency, wait for fifty five knots, pull up." So easy on paper. With the touch of a few fingers, the plane starts hurtling down the runway, and before the young man is fully aware, the wheels have left the ground. He's flying.

There were two really cool things about that first day. The first was hearing my own voice inside my headset. It's kind of like when you hear yourself on someone else's answering machine, and say something like "that so does not sound like me." It's as if you have a third person perspective of the whole thing. Your instructor is in the seat next to you, but since you can't hear him over the engine, you see his mouth move, but hear his voice in your headset. It's really just a cool thing. Little boys love playing with walkie talkies, I guess that never really gets old. I did way more on that first flight than I expected, including controlling the airplane the majority of the time. We didn't travel far, and in fact just went over and circled the downtown area a couple times. This however was one of the neatest things ever. It's not like a commercial plane where your window view is terribly restricted, you pretty much have panoramic views wherever you look. Just passing over areas of downtown you've driven through before a bunch of times and seeing them from over a thousand feet in the air is just cool.

As it turned out I went out again later that same day, and traveled to an uncontrolled airport to practice some landing runs without actually landing. I always figured landing would be the hardest part, and it pretty much comes with experience, knowing when to add power or reduce it, and knowing whether you're too high or low, and too fast or slow. Did I mention flying at night is the coolest ever. The way my instructor's schedule has been working out just randomly has had me doing more night hours than normal, and I'm certainly not complaining. I've been catching onto the navigation material very quickly, which allows us a lot of time to just enjoy the view between checkpoints. I've completed 4 flights so far, with 9 more to go including all manners of lessons.

Interestingly enough, I'm not at all enthusiastic about getting my Private Pilot's License. I guess I'm just more comfortable chilling out somewhere else in the plane telling the pilot what to do than actually having to worry about 47 berjillion checklists on a constant basis. The fact that the navigation material has come easy to me has me feeling pretty confident about JSUNT, but that's easy to say beforehand. I should have all my flights done by December 23rd and thus go home NIFT complete, but weather tends to rear its ugly head occasionally so might end up with a flight or two after the break. Either way I should have some chill time before I leave on the 15th of January for Alabama again. I'm actually looking forward to getting back there now that I'm free to do as I please, and see it from the other side.