Whew! Kind of enjoyed totally solo Tuesday....

Here in the land of Commercial Rating training, it is all VFR! Urgh. I am SUCH an IFR gal, especially in SoCal airspace.
But, gotta get good again at the visual stuff and the solo stuff for this rating, so for a start on the latter I took off Tuesday aft. and flew myself by myself up to CMA for a bit of shopping at Heidi's Place! Went well! Did the miniroute both north and south, smoother south, northbound I was almost in TOA airspace before I got to LAX from HHR's tower, probably I should've CIRCLED around the Fwy Interchange instead of kept going.
Awesome landing at CMA, decent at HHR.
It WAS fun to look outside the cockpit, cuz it was a beautiful day! More to come!

Blonde Pilots go to HWD! Woohee!

Robin is working on the commercial rating, too! Fun to be doing it together.
So we planned, and did, a LONG trip up to Hayward Executive, a friendly, lovely-FBOed (Atlantic Aviation) airport just south of Oakland the second weekend of July, leaving on Friday, staying over at San Leandro Marina Inn, and flying back Saturday since Kiran and Moe's wedding was Sunday.
Unfortunately the WX was not cooperative enough, so we did IFR most of the time, sigh.
She did VFR from HHR to SBA up, and I from SBA to HHR home, but that was all.
At least we have the route planned and can try again VFR, because we need to do VFR solo (it just fits for the long cross country req).

But enough seriousness! Here was the way coolest thing (after the total coolest thing of us being fine pilots!): we went SHOPPING! A LOT!.
Here is our dialogue while Robin is on the FINAL approach to HWD:
Robin aloud to self: "Getting on the center line, airspeed where I want it...."
Me to Robin: "I see JC Penny's, Sears, ROBIN! THERE IS A MALL just to the North!!!"
Robin: "I'm not sure what you're saying honey, but tell me after we land!"
Me: "Okay, but there is A MALL ROBIN!!!"

So, after we dealt with the friendly FBO and BEFORE we went to our Inn, we WENT TO THE MALL (Southland)!!! And got awesome deals at Penny's, Macy's and Victoria's Secret.
Then, we WENT BACK Saturday morn before flying home, and got MORE of the awesome sale tops, and got MANI/PEDIs for the wedding!

Here is a shot of San Luis Reservoir - QUITE far north of SBP airport - from the trip up.

It was not at all all bad being IFR because at least ATC could've helped us if we went done over the mountains - I was a bit twitchy flying over peaks SO much, and being so far west of the I5 and farmland. Hopefully we could've glided that way, we were at 9-11K both ways (got higher both times cuz of turbulence over the mtns).

Got Signed Off in the Cardinal June 7th!

Rick signed me off on the Cardinal Cessna 177RG on June 7th!
Unfortunately I've not flown it a lot since, then, but did get night current in it in July, with Rick's help.
August, here we come!

Librarians and Aviation

Here's a link to posting about my librarian colleague David and his son Sam visiting our flying club's maintenance day earlier this spring!
http://sla-scc.blogspot.com/2009/06/aviation-for-info-geeks.html

Here's me kind of recently with a plane

Over at Borrego Springs on an awesome fun long flight east with Toby in Feb. 09.

RG Really Groovy!

So, I've mastered, enough for a sign off, my Club's Cessna Cardinal retractable gear airplane! Yay!!

I'd always been a bit apprehensive about RG flying, one more thing to go wrong and what about gear-up landings. And while the first point is still true:

1. The SCREAMING (relatively speaking for GA!) speed one gets with the gear up ROCKS!
2. I learned from my instructor and verified that MORE people walk away from RG/gear up landings than from other fixed gear bad landings, because the gear is not there to pitch the plane over on the nose, etc.
3. I know how to control the gear failure by manual pumping and by gear-out landing techniques. Once I realized I could see somewhat out the window whilst pumping the gear down by hand AND that I could look at the turn coordinator and use that data to keep the wings level and the heading centered, I was SUPER HAPPY!
   

Now, on to more steps towards the Commercial Rating! Doing it with Robin this time, fun to pursue a rating with someone who's already a flying partner!

New Erratic Flight Path!

Hi Fans of this erratic blog about my erratic but hugely-important-to-me aviation avocation!

The old blog is still live here:
http://erraticflightpath.blogspot.com/

HOWEVER, I can no longer access it to edit it due to not having my old MSN account any more AND due to Google, oddly for them, NOT being able to find that blog account of mine!

So, I will pick it up again here.

More soon.

Sara T.