So I took my first passenger a week ago, and took Nathan again, along with his mom, for my Cessna 172 checkout, to do circuit practice with the plane fully loaded on Friday. That went well, and the 172 is not too big an adjustment. Nathan handled it a lot better than the first time on Monday, and his mom loved it. The winds were fairly calm, and the 172 doesn’t get blown around quite so bad as the tiny 152, so the afternoon convection turbulence wasn’t too bad.
We were supposed to start my tail-dragger checkout on Monday, but that didn’t happen. I got in, and having forgot to check the weather, saw that there were only about four planes signed out, and it was ten am already. The sky was clear blue, but the wind was crazy strong and gusting. More than the Citabria can handle – they just don’t take that plane out in these kind of winds.
I am intending to go after my commercial license though, and I am going to have to learn to deal with this kind of wind. So we took a 172 out for more circuit practice. First couple of landings were laughable. Holy cow, that wind, and a crosswind at that too. I’ve never made a habit of keeping track of how many landings I do, but I think we did seven or eight. By the end, I was doing much better. And consistently better. It’s weird to remember, this is the same weather she took me up in a few months ago, just for the experience, and what was going through my mind that day was how are we ever going to get this thing on the ground again without being smashed into the runway? And now I’m handling it myself. It’s kind of cool, especially knowing this is one of the most challenging things I’ll have to learn.
But hopefully things will calm down for Wednesday evening when I take another passenger out for a ride.
P.S.: I’m pretty sure I’ve got comments fixed on the last two posts too, if anyone had meant to comment. I had figured my guest post would get lots of comments, and was all confused, wondering why no one was commenting. My fault, I ticked something trying to do something else, and that auto-ticked a box on another page that didn’t auto-untick when I unticked the first thing.
Lindsay Kitson - Author and Pilot 
Yeah! Comments back on.
Sounds like this flying thing could be how you earn your living in due course.
BTW how’s the writing going?
Andy
In due course, indeed it will be. I certain have no future in web administration 😛
But yeah, Sandra’s told me a couple times that she was being nitpicky because I was going to be going after my commercial license, and days like Monday (and possibly today), she wouldn’t bother taking me up if I was planning on sticking to a private license and only flying in good weather.
Writing – not a lot on that front. I’ve got a couple more scenes done. I think I’m done edits to part 1, and I’m starting to work out what needs to go into part 2. There’s a little bit of a romance that I don’t want to gloss over too much, despite being practically allergic to it, and I need to develop some “the plot thickens” scenes with Leon, and then have Leon realize that Michel’s known he was the prince all along, but he can’t figure out how. (And he won’t until book 2.)