This week was another great week for flying. I’m still very behind due to the first couple weeks of weather however I’m starting to get back on track as I slowly make up for lost time. Monday was cancelled due to IFR ceilings and snow. Terrible start to the week given the bad weather. Wednesday was a simulated instrument day. The entire flight was essentially completed under the hood. I needed 0.9 hood time and I ended up getting 1.0. We did a lot of timed turns and climbs and descents based on VSI and airspeed. I also did Pattern A for IFR training for the first time. I did surprisingly well however the maneuever is pretty easy. You only need to scan efficiently and remember times and headings. On Friday, due to such perfect weather (Calm winds and clear skies), I quickly planned a short out-and-back XC to Terre Haute (KHUF). Here’s the GlobalAir.com page for KHUF. https://www.globalair.com/airport/terre-haute-regional-huf.aspx

It was a beautiful day despite the -3° F temperature on the ground. We completed quickly as we were crunched to get back within our 2 hour block. Everything went perfect and I was able to fly the SR-20 GTS model for the first time. It was the same as the SR-20 GS model (the one I normally fly) except it had autopilot, a practice gear switch, an extra propellor blade, and wheel fairings. It was exceptionally smooth. I even was able to use the autopilot while entering into the pattern. Extremely smooth!

Overall another fantastic flying week!

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This week was still pretty good compared to the first couple weeks of flying. Weather was good for only the days that I flew, and terrible for the other days. I feel bad for the Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday students who weren’t able to fly but I’m glad it wasn’t me. On Monday, My instructor and I worked on commercial lessons and simulated instrument training. The maneuvers were ok but it had been a while since I did them so I wasn’t too uspet with my poor performance. I still need to work on lazy 8’s but this article on GlobalAir.com for finding a pivotal altitude definitely helps. https://blog.globalair.com/post/2019/12/04/how-to-determine-your-pivotal-altitude .

The simulated instrument stuff was pretty easy and enjoyable. On Wednesday, I did the same thing with more of a focus on simulated instrument. I did the maneuvers alot better than on Monday. I was proud of my performance given the previous flight. The simulated instrument was the same and we got to do everyone’s favorite training, recovery from unusual attitudes. On Friday, the weather looked good right over the airport but an airport 15 miles away was calling IFR so we decided to play it safe and do a discussion instead. I got to try out the Crosswind training simulator (pictured in the cover). It was really cool to use to get better at the crab and slip techniques when compensating for crosswind.

Overall a really good week.

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Once again, weather plagued my flying this week. Fortunately I was able to fly once and get back into the cirrus after 2 weeks. On Monday, weather was terrible. Actually, to shorten this blog im going to preface this week by saying that every single day this week was terrible weather. Due to this, my instructor and I discussed aeromedical factors of flying. This includes hypoxia and hyperventilation, the IMSAFE checklist and other important details relating to airman medical stuff. I did this same discussion last semester but it was good to go back through and re-learn what I had forgotten after a semester. On Wednesday, the weather remained terrible but was just barely good enough for us to stay in the pattern. We did our landings lesson in the pattern since thats about the only thing we could do. We went over short field, soft field, accuracy, and crosswind takeoffs and landings. My instructor also demonstrated a no flaps landing as a reference if I ever have a flaps malfunction. It was a pretty good lesson I was just glad to finally fly after being grounded for so long. On friday, My instructor did our final semester discussion over weight and balance. We went over performance charts and weight and balance calculations. Once again, the same as last semester but definitely a need to know topic. One of the tougher portions was remembering the effects of foreword and aft cg. This blog on GlobalAir.com’s website is a good resource for remembering each one. https://blog.globalair.com/post/2020/01/14/how-cg-location-can-affect-airplane-performance

Overall, I was glad that I was finally able to fly but I sure hope the weather gets better in the future.

Thanks for reading!

This week was very informational but not very good in terms of flying. Due to MLK day on Monday, I only had 2 slots. On Wednesday, cross countries, stage checks, and check rides took priority over my slot. This meant that, despite having perfect weather, I wasn’t able to fly. Although I was sad to miss out on such good weather, the discussion my instructor and I did was one of the most informational discussions I’ve had at Purdue. We discussed aircraft systems (which I’ve already done many times). The only difference from previous times I’ve discussed systems was that we went into the hangar and did our discussion around an un-cowled SR-20 engine. I know all about the engine from studying for the stage check and I’ve seen the engine of the SR-20. However, doing the entire lesson and thoroughly looking at every little wire in the engine was very eye opening. I was able to locate things I had read about and see everything they connected to. Overall a very good lesson. On Friday, the weather was terrible having cloud bases at 600′. This discussion was over weather, my least favorite. Again, it was a good discussion and I re-learned alot of weather aspects I kind of forgot about. We reviewed pireps, metars, tafs, notams, HIWAS, etc which I also found on GlobalAir.com’s personalized flight page for me. https://www.globalair.com/myflightdept/account.aspx .

Overall this week was really good and I learned alot despite not being able to fly.

This week was my first official week of the semester! Overall, my classes all went well.

My flying this week was sparse due to weather and lack of an instructor but overall was not terrible. My new flying schedule is now Monday, Wednesday, Friday instead of Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday which is a lot better. My slot on Monday consisted of doing a discussion with a random instructor. The instructor assigned to me this semester hasn’t had his standardization flight that allows him to teach me due to weather so he can’t do discussions or flights until he gets that done. The first discussion was only over the course expectations and guidelines so nothing interesting. On Wednesday, I did another discussion due to weather. This time, we discussed airspace. This discussion was the exact same as the airspace discussion I had last semester. But definitely good knowledge to be ingrained into my mind. On Friday, the weather was finally good enough to fly in. I was again assigned a random instructor and we basically did a re-familiarization flight. We focused on landings and takeoffs (short field, soft field, accuracy, etc). We also did slow flight, stalls, and steep turns. Overall, everything went well. It had been a while since last flying so it wasn’t perfect but wasn’t bad either. While we were flying, one of Purdue’s planes had a landing gear malfunction. I heard from my instructor that it hand pumped the gear down after declaring an emergency but the gear collapsed on landing. I haven’t read anything to support this but I did hear the transmissions over the tower frequency. Fortunately, I believe the pilot is ok. In addition, everything was back to normal by the time we landed at the airport. This article on GlobalAir.com is something I checked out after the incident to get a better idea on how to mitigate such an error. https://blog.globalair.com/post/2019/07/14/How-to-Manually-Extend-Your-Gear-in-an-Emergency .

Thanks for reading!

Continuing my random blog posts for Christmas break, this post will be about my schedule that I recently found out about. Unfortunately, my travelling for break has finished and with it my posts about airports I went to.

Recently I got my schedule for the upcoming school year and I went over all of my classes. Turns out, my schedule is a lot better this semester than last semester. The more flight related courses and less work abundant courses are the main contributors to my easier schedule. Overall, I have 4 aviation related courses. I have my normal flight block, a simulation block (the sim building is pictured in the cover), my instrument ground course, and a course on power plants (or engines). All of these seem really interesting and I’m very excited to go and see what I can learn in each class. My flight block is continuing flight in the cirrus SR-20s but instead of a commercial training focus like the first semester, second semester is more focused on an introduction to instrument maneuvers. This will also be cool due to being introduced to a new type of flying. My instrument flight course will be interesting too. It will be the first lecture style course that I will be taking related to piloting an aircraft. The power plants course will also show me more of the maintenance side of flying with the content revolving around the engines. Unfortunately, I have all 3 hours of that lecture on Tuesdays which should be extremely fun. Finally, the simulator course doesn’t start until the last half of the semester so I’m very interested to start instrument flying in a simulator. The sim building’s new addition is the Hawker 900XP simulator similar to this real aircraft for sale on GlobalAir.com https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/ListingDetail/Hawker-900XP?AdId=88340 .

This week, still being Christmas break, I will continue to talk about my traveling experiences and the aviation related things I saw and experienced.

First, let me start off by saying that Los Angeles International Airport (KLAX) is terrible. Here is KLAX’s page on GlobalAir.com https://www.globalair.com/airport/los-angeles-international-lax.aspx . After Christmas, my family and went to LA and Las Vegas for a couple days to see family. The flight was great and the approach is really cool into LAX due to all the other air traffic you see when flying near the airport. My hate for LAX comes from its transportation between terminals. Due to the current construction going on, in order to get to one of the Delta terminals, we had to take a bus on the ramp from the main terminal. The bus frequency wasn’t bad but the idea of having to travel on the ramp to get to a gate was unthinkable until then. I will admit, stopping on the taxiway to let a 757 pass in front of us was pretty awesome and being so close to them really gave me a perspective on how giant those planes are. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at the airport long enough to explore despite being one of my favorite airports to be at. Although the terminal transportation system seems to be bad, watching an A380 land right next to me definitely makes up for the spotty logistics. The 757 can’t even compare to the size and stature of one of those giants.

This week, since I had no flight lessons or flight discussions, I will be talking about my trip to Puerto Rico and all the aviation related things I encountered while I was there.

Over break, I traveled to Puerto Rico with my girlfriend and her family as that is where she is from. Since my planning solely relied on spending the least amount of money I could, I was forced to wait 7 hours at the Puerto Rican airport (KSJU). Similar to my overnight stay at Chicago’s O’hare airport (KORD, written about in week of 9/30), my time was spent exploring all of the terminals and gates. Unfortunately for me, Puerto Rico’s airport was significantly smaller than O’hare, having only 4 terminals. This led to spending less time exploring than O’hare. In addition, I checked a bag on this trip so I wasn’t able to be inside the terminal area for long out of fear of my bag being stolen from baggage claim. During my time in the airport, I saw a lot of interesting things I hadn’t seen before (not to say they’re uncommon). One thing that stood out to me was stores that acted as walkways. Walking from terminal to terminal was inside stores. The second thing that stood out to me was taxiing to the gate surrounded by smaller single engine prop planes such as the Cessna Caravan, similar to this one on GlobalAir.com https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/ListingDetail/Grand-Caravan-208B?AdId=89226 . This is due to all the local flights to surrounding islands. Watching all these small aircraft depart before and after a321s was an interesting sight. Due to my time constraints, the bulk of my time was spent watching movies.

I officially passed 243!

This week was the most critical week for me out of the entire semester as I had my 243 stage check. On Tuesday, my instructor and I met with another instructor and his student to do a group review for the oral portion of the 243 stage check. Overall, the review went great. I missed a few easy things that I should’ve known but it was great to benchmark where I was in my studying. I felt prepared and I knew what to study for the rest of the week. My stage check was scheduled on Thursday at 8 am. Luckily, one day before I was scheduled to drive home. Studying went well despite also needing to study for my finals. On Thursday, I arrived in the morning to the office of my examiner and he looked over my hours to make sure I had all the requirements. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I was missing a mere 0.3 of dual time needed to complete my course. Luckily the examiner was nice enough to call my instructor to quickly to a lap around the pattern to get the last 0.3. Once that was done, I was able to begin the oral portion. The oral went well overall. I missed a couple things that I definitely should’ve known but I also knew several things that I don’t remember studying which was a plus. The flight followed and went equally as well. My maneuvers were all good except for the lazy eights and chandelles. I did all the procedures correctly and the maneuvers weren’t bad, however, my examiner thought that I could’ve done them smoother with a more consistent change in the attitude of the aircraft. Not bad but needs improvement. In addition, my patterns were really bad. The wind was pretty bad and my nerves were the same so I blame it on that. My examiner mentioned that my power wasn’t as consistent as it could’ve been as well. However, my landings were good despite the rough patterns. After that, we went inside and he signed my logbook and filled out my stage check complete form. Overall, a great week and I was able to finish at the perfect time. So glad I don’t have to finish it after break. I also started to put my paper logbook into GlobalAir.com’s online logbook software just in case something ever happens to the paper one. https://www.globalair.com/logbook/newaircraft.aspx?count=0 .

I will continue to update through Christmas but it will be surrounding aviation topics and other things as opposed to personal experiences.

Thanks for reading!

This week was an extremely good week for flying. I somehow managed to fly 4 times this week! On Tuesday, I did my final dual maneuvers practice. Unfortunately it didn’t go as well as I would’ve hoped. I just messed up on some of the maneuvers in really simple ways. Even though these were the same maneuvers I thought I already had down. I’m blaming it on the week break I took from flying SR-20s for thanksgiving. On Thursday, My instructor and I had a discussion to go over the oral content that was gonna be on the stage check. It was a really good idea to start studying when I did because I already feel prepared for the oral portion of my stage check. Also on Thursday I did some solo maneuvers practice. Officially, I planned on this being my final practice before my actual stage check. I made sure to focus on the maneuvers and I did much better than with my instructor (of course no one was there to witness it). I felt pretty good for all the maneuvers after that. On Friday, my instructor did a simulated stage check. We just went down the list of all possible maneuvers an examiner could ask me. I was thoroughly surprised with how well I did on all of them. For the first time, I did all the maneuvers perfectly. We planned on getting 1.7 hours to finish off all of my flying but incoming weather cut us down to only 1.3. This resulted in my Saturday flight. On Saturday, I flew for .4 hours (20 minutes). Since I was only allowed .4 to finish the course, I got to do 2 laps around the pattern and nothing more. Overall, a relaxing flight focusing on the basics. It was the first flight in a while where I wasn’t stressed from the maneuvers. Overall one of the best weeks I’ve had for flying. Now all I have to do is wait for my stage check to be scheduled and study hard!

I also found a list of aviation training materials on GlobalAir.com that pilots can use to determine where to buy study guides. https://www.globalair.com/directories/Training-Materials-130.html

Thanks for reading!