This past Saturday I was able to do something that I had been wanting to again for the past five and a half years...pilot an airplane!
After earning my private pilot's license in 2001, I flew for about another year, then bought a house, went back to college to finish my degree, took a trip to Europe, busted my knee and got married. Needless to say, flying took a back seat because I lacked the time and money. However, the desire was always there. I mainly had to be content with Flight Simulator on my PC or getting the random flight with my uncle when he still owned his Cherokee 235.
My wife and I have been blessed with good jobs and in recent weeks we have been able to sell my old home (which had been on the market for the past year, fortunately we still made some money on the sale) and subsequently paid off our car. This left us without any "consumer" type debt, ie., credit cards, car loans, student loans, etc. In other words, I finally had some money to go flying again. My wife and I had been talking about me getting back into it for some time and we more or less came to the conclusion that it would be feasible for me to start looking around for a school or club to rent from.
To my dismay, the cost of flying has gone up...alot. Most of this has been due to the recent runup in the price of oil, and therefore avgas. Aviation is the last user of any kind of leaded fuel in the US to the best of my knowledge, which has always made it more expensive than automotive fuel, but in the past 12-18 months it has just gotten absolutely ridiculous. Then most of the schools and clubs (those left) seem to have rid themselves of what I considered to be "affordable" aircraft. I was used to flying aircraft that were older than me (I'm 30) or maybe a year or two newer at most. Now most schools and clubs have sold off most of their older aircraft in lieu of models that are less than 10 years old. Nicer to be sure, but it limits the options of budget pilots. So I pretty much had to resign myself that if I wanted to fly again, I was just going to have to suck it up in the near term.
So this past Saturday, I headed down to Fulton County Airport, just outside of Atlanta, to check out a couple of prospective operations. First place I checked out, Fulton Aviation, appeared to be closed or at least unmanned on Saturdays. Let me interrupt this by saying once you've been flying once and decide you like it, once you end up at an airport with the intent of doing it again, its hard to deny yourself. So I continued my search and ended up at Superior Flight School and before I know it, I had some time booked with an instructor, Monte Evans. We took up one of their G1000 equipped C172s, N429J, for a spin around the west side of Atlanta. I did the pre-flight with a little help, mainly just updating me on some of the nuances of a newer model 172. Everything looked good, so into the cockpit I went. Headsets plugged in, checklists gone over, check ATIS, set radios, start engine. Call ground, get a clearance to the active. Taxi down, go through a runup. Call tower..."November 429 Juliet, clear for takeoff, Rwy 26". We're rolling. 60 knots, start pulling back on that yoke.
We're airborne. If I've ever had a bigger smile on my face, I can't remember when.
I climb up to about 1,500 feet, then make a turn towards the house, after a short 5-10 minutes, I'm circling above my house looking it from the air for the first time. I planned to go up to about 3,000, but the clouds had something else to say about that, so 2,500 had to do for today since I was just flying VFR. Then I head out towards the new airport being built just west of Dallas, the new Paulding County Regional. A few more miles puts me over the Polk County Airport (4A4) where a couple of airplanes are tooling around the pattern and a jump-plane is climbing to let some folks do some skydiving. I decide to turn south to head towards my old stomping grounds, Coweta County Airport (CCO). On the way down, Monte shows me some more of the features of the G1000, such as traffic alerts and weather, as well as the basic functions of the GPS itself. I wanted to do a quick touch and go just to get a look at the airfield, but some weather right over Newnan got in the way, so I turned back towards FTY, picked up some flight following (I would be flying right below the departure path of Hartsfield Intl) and within another 20 minutes or so, I was getting cleared to land. I came in a little high and a tad fast, but I actually got it down with little fuss. I floated it but still had it down on the first 1500' of the strip...not bad for someone who hadn't been behind the controls in 5+ years!
Monte gave me a pretty good review and put down the first 1.3 hours in my log book since December 27, 2002. He said I'd probably be looking at another 2-3 sessions to get back up to speed with what he saw that day, one day to go over the stuff everyone hates to do, but you've got to know...slow flight, stalls, steep turns...you get the picture. Plus some pattern work just to make sure I can get it up and down OK. Monte seems like he's a pretty good CFI and pretty good guy and despite it not being the cheapest place to train, I think I'm going to finish filing out the paperwork I was given and keep going there until I'm current again. I should have my medical renewed tomorrow (actually today as I type this) and will probably stop by to turn everything in and join the flying club this Saturday and get scheduled for some more time.
Next step...getting my wife to fly with me!! That may turn out to be more of a challenge than this has been.
