Our first week of flight training and first road trip!

Everyone has a flight partner from their class and I'm lucky enough to be with one of my house mates, though it’s a little intimidating as he’s already got a PPL and I'm an absolute beginner on the PA28, nether-the-less I was excited as I went in for lesson 1 on Tuesday 31^st March. We got to meet our instructor and completely lucked out; he’s an ex-military fast jet pilot with so much flying experience on all kinds of aircraft. And he’s absolutely hilarious; I definitely won’t be bored being in the cockpit with him!

For our first day we performed the start-up check-lists in the simulator which was a bit of fun without being in anyone’s way on the ramp as we were pretty slow at doing them at first, as with anything this will come with practice. After doing the check-list 3 times each, Lee (our instructor) let us take the simulator off and have a little ‘fly’ around with it. Those things are pretty difficult to land and pretty easy to taxi off the side of the runway. Bodes well for my first flight the day after….

This is our daily schedule before a flight:

• Check in

• RMS form for the individual aircraft. This just shows when maintenance or oil changes etc. will be due. We have to print it off and check it’s all up to date.

• FRAT form – This is a checklist of safety factors that may need to be regulated for us as student pilots like wind conditions or not carrying enough water with you.

• Pull the weather; METARs and TAFs just like we learnt how to read in ground school Met J or listen to the Falcon Field ATIS but this is only active after 6am (Yes, sometimes we are in earlier than that).

• Mass & Balance (again, ground school skills, our instructors would be so proud!) this also has the performance graphs in to calculate take-off and landing distances needed. This will be especially important during the summer as the heat will increase all the distances. 

• Pre-flight the air-plane and do the walk-around to check it’s airworthy and has enough fuel for the flight. We have a check-list for this one but it’s been pretty easy to learn by heart.

• We present the paperwork to the instructor to sign it all off and have a quick briefing about what we’ll be doing that day.

• Report to Dispatch to hand in the paperwork and collect the book, this is to record the Hobbs and Tach time for our flight and has the keys, squawk sheets (this is how you report a problem you've found with the plane) and a credit card for fuelling at other airports.

We’re going to fly five days a week with two days off at the moment though this could easily change when we need to fit in more solos and check-rides. It’s been pretty tiring even for the first week as it’s a very fast-paced environment to be learning in and just getting used to the aircraft as well as the check-lists is mentally tiring.

As we had two days off for the weekend (well, our weekend is Sunday and Monday) my house mates and I decided we should go for our first road trip. Number one item on the agenda is the Grand Canyon, something I've always wanted to see. It was incredible and definitely didn't disappoint. We stopped at a small aircraft museum on the way back before stopping at some cheap, the movie Psycho springs to mind, motel in Flagstaff for the night. After living in Gilbert, it was surprisingly cold in Flagstaff due to it’s elevation and we had to rush to Wal-Mart in the evening to buy a hoodie! I'm not sure how much use I’ll get out of it but I really needed it! One the way back we took the scenic route through the mountains and forests instead of just staying on the free-way, I'm really surprised about how green it actually is here, amongst all the sand and cacti of course.  We ended up stopping and going for a walk in gorgeous Sedona, I was almost more impressed with the views than I was at the Grand Canyon, probably because I didn't know what to expect. It was gorgeous; I’d definitely recommend it and am very up for suggestions on placed to go next time J