A little trip

About 30 nautical miles to the south/southwest of Cooking Lake is a town called Wetaskiwin, which is the home of the Reynolds Museum, a world-renowned transportation, aviation, and agricultural machinery museum. It happens to be immediately adjacent to the airport so it's handy to fly in and walk over. So, today, I flew my dad and my son down there to pay a visit.

We were only at the museum for an hour but we managed to have a quick look at almost every exhibit. It's very well done; I was very impressed! I would highly recommend it.

It turned out to be a stellar day so the flight was smooth and beautiful. As a new pilot, this was another chance for me to practice cross-country skills and an arrival at an unfamiliar airport. The flight went well, except for a mistake in my heading calculation, which I corrected when I realized that my track wasn't quite matching the line I had drawn on the map! I was able to see Wetaskiwin from a fair distance out and had no trouble locating the airport. The flight home was more relaxed because I could see Cooking Lake almost as soon as I took off so I just flew there. This was a fun day. It's pretty neat to just hop in a plane and fly off somewhere!

My first passenger

I took my first passenger up today. My dad is a pilot and I spent my whole life flying with him so it was an honour and a thrill for me to take him up on my first flight as a licensed pilot. He wanted to do circuits with me since it's "the biggest bang for my buck." We did six. It's a lovely day today. My circuits were sharp and my landings were good. Glad I could pull it off with him in the plane with me! He barely said a word but he really enjoyed it and I could tell he was proud of me. So cool.

I am a pilot!

I took my flight test two days ago and I passed! I am a licensed private pilot!

This is the plane I flew for the test

That was stressful! Everything you know has to come together in one shot! You don't have to be perfect but you have one chance to demonstrate each skill so you have to get it pretty close the first time. The test begins with a circuit to demonstrate a specialty take-off and landing. I was asked to do a short field take-off and then he let me choose the landing so I opted for the soft field. That went well.

After that, we departed for the cross-country/navigation demonstration. The night before, I had to prepare a flight plan for a trip that we would start on during the test. I was happy with my departure procedure and I was bang on track at the first checkpoint, where I had to calculate my ground speed and ETA. Then we stopped that exercise and headed toward the practice area. The rest of the test included stalls, steeps turns, slow flight, slipping, instrument flying with the hood on so you can't see outside, emergency and precautionary landings, and diversions. My instrument time wasn't ideal because I didn't have the plane trimmed up nicely so I didn't hold my altitude as well as I could have. Everything else was good, I thought, but I didn't know what my marks were. The examiner was kind and fair but I was still pretty intimidated! On the 10 minute flight back to the airport, we chatted about this and that. I did a nice landing and taxied back to the flight school hangar. After I had shut down, he said, "Well, Sarah..." - eternal pause, my heart was pounding - "....Congratulations! That was a nice flight test." I threw my head back and let out a big sigh! What a relief! What a thrill! When I went inside to do the log books, everyone in the office congratulated me and I actually jumped up and down with excitement.

Today I went out to the airport again to get my temporary license signed and to see my instructor, who was not at the airport during my test (he was, in fact, flying up north that day, and heard me on the radio during my flight test). He was very pleased for me and proud of me. He is the most awesome instructor I ever could have had. This was a great day. I did it!