Disapproval

Well, my application for instrument rating was disapproved (that's the proper way of saying I failed my check ride). I have an excuse that I could easily use here to make it look like I was somehow victimized, but the reality is that I made a very foolish mistake that could have been fatal if I'd been by myself in actual instrument weather conditions. So I didn't pass this time. The good news is that I have a sort of "get out of jail free" card that will make it so I only have to redo that part of the check ride that I did wrong. I won't have to redo the oral or any other portions of the flight. In practical terms this means that, when Belinda approves me to retest, I'll get in the plane with my examiner, fly to Libby, do 2 instrument approaches, and come home. That's not so bad. It's really not. And I'm still ALL DONE STUDYING!

Murphy's Law

I had a long, ranting post all typed out, but I decided it wasn't necessarily written with the most Christlike of attitudes. Here's the short version: I didn't think to reserve 737ND for this morning so I could use it on my check ride. Accordingly, someone else took it before I got to the aviation building this morning. The only other plane I could have flown is one I've never flown before, so I wasn't really comfortable with the idea of taking it on a check ride. Despite that, I tried to preflight it, but the battery was dead. So I called my examiner and asked him if we could go at 1130, instead, which was fine by him. Immediately after I hung up, I went and reserved 7ND for 1130. Now, if God will keep the winds from getting too strong, I should have myself a check ride in a few hours.

Giant Killer

After a fairly difficult start (for reasons I'm too tired to explain right now), I passed my oral exam at about 5:15 this afternoon. I'm scheduled to fly the hands-on portion of the exam tomorrow morning at 7:30. But the important thing is, I'M DONE STUDYING FOR THE INSTRUMENT ORAL!!! No matter how tomorrow goes, I'm done studying. I can enjoy my weekend and cross-stitch and do anything I want, without feeling the slightest bit guilty that I'm not studying for my oral! Thank you all for your prayers. God was faithful, just like always.

I just found out (seriously, it was only about 10 minutes ago) that my examiner doesn't want to start my check ride until 12:30 tomorrow afternoon. He also mentioned that we may very well end up doing the oral tomorrow and saving the hands-on until Wednesday (assuming we have decent winds on Wednesday). I'm mostly okay with that possibility. It enables me to really focus on passing the oral, without having flight stuff rolling around in the back of my mind the whole time. An added bonus of drawing the exam out like that, is that I probably won't have a flight period on Thursday (we'll just start fresh on Monday), so I'll have a four-day weekend in which I won't have to do ANY studying!!! Cross-stitch, here I come!

Goliath

Despite my posting about it yesterday morning, the reality of my situation didn't actually hit me until last night around bedtime. That's when my smile went away and the anxiety made my guts feel like overactive snakes. I hate getting like this anytime something important is about to happen in my life. I hate being all preoccupied and jittery and moody. I so badly want to just take this in stride, to have the sort of confidence David had when he turned down armor and went to face a giant with a sling and 5 smooth stones. I guess it's all about faith. And I guess I'm seeing how small mine really is.

Check Ride

It's now official (or as official as anything in the aviation world can be, with the wind as gusty and unpredictable as it's been lately): my check ride for my instrument rating is Tuesday. The oral will probably begin around 9 and, assuming I don't fail it, the flight portion will probably happen sometime around noon. This weekend (and Monday), I'll be hitting the books to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Today's big topic of study is going to be weather and aviation weather services. I would really appreciate prayer for Tuesday. Thanks!

Resolution

Kelly got me thinking when she suggested I have a second blog to serve as our missionary webpage. I thought it was a really smart idea, so I created a new blog this afternoon and e-mailed Cathy about it. If all goes according to plan, the link will be changed so that it goes to the new blog, and I can stop trying to figure out how to make this blog more missionary-ish. Now I just have to come up with something to put on the new blog.

Great Expectations?

I discovered, yesterday, that Jen and I are now mentioned on the missionaries page of Immanuel's website, along with a "click here for more info" link that delivers the curious to this blog. Now, I have no problem at all with how that's set up, but it's gotten me really thinking about my blog. I recently had a conversation with our Bisbee pastor, in part about people's expectations (and the expectations I perceive people having) of Jen and me as missionaries in training. And now on our home church's missionary page, there's a link to my blog intended for people to get to know more about us and what we're doing. Up til now, I haven't intended my blog to be the sort of online prayer letter that so many missionaries' blogs and websites wind up being. But is that what it should be? Until now, this blog has just been me (infrequently) posting thoughts or rants or play-by-plays of important events or (even more infrequently) photos. But now it feels like it should be something more than that; not necessarily more formal, but perhaps more formatted, if that makes any sort of sense at all. All this time, I've sort of been operating under the assumption that the only people who come here and read stuff are people who already know who we are and what we're doing and just want my personal take on whatever Jen's already posted about (she's way better at blogging than I am). That's sort of been the purpose of all this. But now it's been given sort of a different purpose, and I'm trying to figure out exactly what effect that new purpose should have on az2maf. What do you guys think? Despite the flavor of the comments on my last couple posts, this isn't just some trick to get more people to comment on my blog. I really want your thoughts, opinions, etc.

As I was saying...

I was so shocked to see that someone besides my wife or Kara actually posted a comment on my blog, that I'm now going to finish my earlier tale of the stage check gone wrong. I'm in a bit of an awkward situation in the flight program, because my flight instructor is the school's assistant chief flight instructor, one of only two people who work on campus who could perform my stage check. Since I flew my long IFR with her, she couldn't serve as my examiner on the stage check (it would look shady). The chief flight instructor is the only other person here who could do my stage check, but he's going to be the examiner on my check ride, so that wouldn't work, either (it would also look shady). What's the solution to this horrible dilemma? Why, ask Dr. Bob to come down from Tucson and fly the stage check, of course! Dr. Bob is the chief flight instructor of our Tucson satellite facility. He took up flight instruction after he retired from his position as CEO of some company (read: old). So Dr. Bob flew down on Thursday morning. I'd only met him one time before that morning, and my first impression of him was that he was very quiet... and old. My experience with him on Thursday pretty well solidified that impression in my mind. He struggled to think up questions to ask me on the oral and, I think because of our age difference, we had a really hard time communicating. He'd ask me a question that I wouldn't understand. I'd give him an answer that he wouldn't understand. Then he'd tell me I was wrong and proceed to give an explanation that I wouldn't understand. It was frustrating.

After an hour, Dr. Bob looked at his watch and said, "We've been here about an hour, right? Let's go fly." So I went out and did my preflight inspection. Everything looked okay (though I admit, I forgot to check the fuel tanks. It should probably be stated at this point that I sometimes flake out pretty badly in stressful situations) so I went back in and told him I was ready to fly, but that I needed to use the restroom first. He said he'd meet me outside, so I ran to the bathroom. When I got outside, Bob had the right wing untied and he was in the process of untying the tail. Since I always untie the wings one after the other, I just assumed that he'd already untied the left wing, as well, since he was working on the tail. Keep in mind I could have just looked at the chain, since it was on my side of the plane and everything. But I didn't. So we got in the plane, I went through my checklist, and started the plane. I made sure everything was up to snuff, then attempted to taxi out of the shade hangar. We got about three feet before there was a horrible sound and the nose jerked hard to the left. Apparently, that's what happens when you don't untie the left wing. A mechanic came running out and made sure the wing wasn't broken, then helped me untie the wing. I started the plane back up and we taxied out to the runway. I got most of the way through my "before takeoff" checklist. In fact, I got to the part where you tune your radios and make sure they're all working properly. I got so frazzled by the thought that I was taking too long, that I forgot to finish the checklist. The only two items I missed were turning on the lights and setting the flaps at 10 degrees. See, a Cessna 182 requires you to have 10 degrees of flaps out when you take off, so you can get sufficient lift. Yeah. I took off without my flaps. I noticed that the plane really didn't want to leave the ground, but I got it off and then proceeded with my climb checklist (yeah, planes have checklists for just about everything). When I got to the "retract flaps" part, i realized my mistake. It was going to be a long, long ride.

I feel it's necessary, at this point, to state for the record that Dr. Bob was pretty weak in his role as stage check examiner. The point of the IFR check ride (and, accordingly, the final stage check) is to make sure a student can function in Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC) under an instrument flight plan. A HUGE part of that is maintaining proper communications with Air Traffic Control. Since neither check takes part under an actual instrument flight plan, though, the examiner is supposed to pretend to be the Air Route Traffic Control Center and give clearances and stuff to the student. I actually had to ask Bob to give me clearances. And then, when we got to Sierra Vista, which has a control tower (and, logically, controllers), Bob took over the radio and made my calls for me, so then I basically had to ask him if I could do the talking. I did two instrument approaches at Libby (Sierra Vista Airport is also Libby Army Airfield; it's a joint-use, so we usually just call it Libby); one was pretty good, and one was not as good. Then Dr. Bob had me fly direct back to Bisbee Douglas International (it's a non-towered airport about 7 miles northeast of the college) for one more approach. I was about 5/6 of the way done with the approach, when Bob told me to break it off and head for home because some yahoo was flying around over the airport and Bob couldn't spot him. Keep in mind that I made the entire flight without being able to see outside the plane, so Bob had to watch all the traffic to make sure we didn't hit anyone.

When we got back to the school, I made a decent (not good by any means) landing and parked us back in the shade hangar. We got back inside and Dr. Bob proceeded to critique my flight. The problem was that I had to tell him which things I'd done wrong, because he couldn't remember. Then he started filling out my logbook (his entry is nearly unreadable because it has to be written kind of small and, again, he's pretty old), and asked me if I had any questions. (This is my favorite part of the whole thing.) I said, "Did I pass?" And he very casually replied, "Sure." Then he ate a hamburger and I walked out.

I told all of this to my instructor on Monday, and she decided that we would unofficially redo the flight portion of the stage check, since it's virtually identical to the flight portion of the check ride. Unfortunately, we were going to fly that do-over today and possibly again tomorrow, as well, but since I'm sick I didn't go to my flight period today and, unless I'm back to 100% tomorrow morning, I'm probably not flying tomorrow, either. Very, very frustrating.

Stage Check, or That Really Stupid Thing I Did

The day after my long IFR that went so miraculously well, I had my stage check. Now there's been some confusion as to just what the heck this stage check was about, so I'll take a moment to explain it before I tell you how it went. In the Federal Aviation Regulations, there are two different sections (Part 61 and Part 141) under which a student can learn to fly. Part 61 is sort of the norm for anyone who goes out to a local airport, hires an instructor, and rents a plane so they can learn to fly. Part 141 is intended more for flight schools. It's certainly the more clearly-defined of the two Parts, because, at least in theory, a pilot who learned Part 141 is probably going to be favored by a potential employer, over a pilot who learned Part 61. Part 141 schools have to teach by an approved syllabus, and each stage of a student's progress has to be checked by a stage check (consisting of an oral exam and an actual flight with an approved instructor). Here's where it all applies to my situation: before a Part 141 instrument student can take the check ride (the actual test that will actually earn that student his Instrument Rating), that student is required to take a "final stage check" to determine whether that student is ready to take the check ride. And that's what I took last Thursday. This regulation is both a blessing and a curse to a student. It's a blessing because failing a stage check doesn't go on any sort of permanent record, while failing a check ride will haunt a pilot when he's looking for employment. It's a curse because the stage check is more or less exactly the same thing as the check ride, so even if you pass it with flying colors, you still have to turn around and do it all again with a different person in the right seat.

I've been really sick the last couple days with some kind of respiratory infection or something. Typing everything I just typed has made me really tired, so I think I'll wait til later to tell you how my stage check went. Sorry. I didn't mean for this to be a two-parter.

I reckon it's time to update. I flew my long IFR cross-country this morning. It went great! As I tend to base my worth as a pilot on however my most recent flight went, I'm feeling about 10 feet tall right now. The purpose of the flight was to make sure I could fly according to an IFR (instrument flight rules) flight plan, if the weather was ever bad enough that I couldn't fly visually. To that end, I had to wear the hood (a view-limiting device) from a few minutes after takeoff until just a few minutes before touchdown at the college. What that ultimately means is that I flew from CC to Casa Grande (south of Phoenix) to Tucson and back to Douglas without being able to see outside the airplane. My instructor was with me, acting as my safety pilot; she was my eyes outside the plane. Like I said, everything went great. In fact, the whole thing came off far better than I had expected it to. It really did wonders for my confidence level, both regarding my IFR skills as well as my piloting skills in general. This all just might work out, after all.

Thanks to those who prayed for me. Your efforts made the difference.


Oh! I almost forgot to mention this. I received my logbook endorsements last week, for both complex and high performance airplanes. In order to fly high performance airplanes (each engine on the plane being over 200 horsepower) or complex airplanes (the plane has retractable landing gear, an adjustable pitch propeller, and cowl flaps), a pilot has to receive instruction in the appropriate type of airplane and then get a written endorsement in his logbook from a qualified instructor. Since the school uses Cessna 182s for instrument training, and since our 182s are complex and high performance, I got endorsed for both types last week. So now, if I ever get the chance to rent one type or the other (or both), I'll be able to. Exciting stuff!