"I know, I know. It's been a long time, but I don't want you to blame yourself for this. It's not you, it's me. Please don't feel bad. It's not that I think we should part ways, I just felt that we needed some time apart, baby. You know... sometimes I need time to myself. I get busy... and you... you get needy, we get boring together baby, and I just have to leave for a while. But I'm back now, baby. I'm back for good. And I'm ready to treat you right baby. I'm a new man. Please baby, give me another chance. Please?"
Ever heard that before? I know, me neither. But I felt like injecting some good ol' humor into this blog. It went missing for a while.
By the way, don't you hate it when people apologize on their blog for not updating their blog often enough? I do too! So... the above paragraph was not an apology, it was consolation. I hope everyone feels better now. Can we move on?
So, I've been flying a good amount for the past few weeks. I'd say an average of a couple of times a week. I've been flying by myself, and with my instructor, continuing to learn new exercises. When I fly by myself, I'm still only allowed to fly circuits with normal, soft field and and short field landings and take-offs, with obstructions. But, I'm not yet allowed to venture away from the airport. That privilege comes after I'm efficient at doing precautionary and forced landings.
It's a lot of information I wrote in the paragraph above, but I'll break it down a bit.
To start off, I have a good story from today. I was booked to fly solo today, just to practice circuits. I did as I do every time, walk around, got into the airplane, turned things on, checklists, etc. Everything went smoothly, and after I got permission, I began taxiing to the active runway.
During my taxi, the communications radio was giving me trouble. There was an intermittent loud, squelching noise, but I figured it would go away, and it eventually did. It did keep on coming back and forth as I was taxiing and waiting to be cleared to take off. The takeoff clearance eventually came, and as I lined up the airplane on the runway and pushed the throttle in, the noise came back in full force.
I was then faced with a decision: Do I continue the takeoff knowing that I'll be in the air with the possibility of not being able to (or having great difficulty) communicate with the tower, or do I cut the throttle and abort the takeoff while I can?
Well, before you can say (insert whatever word it is someone would say that people say when they say this phrase), I cut the throttle, put on the breaks, made sure that I still had total control of the airplane, and that the airplane was safe, and then, over the squelching noise, I told tower that I'm "aborting takeoff due to radio failure". As I said that, The nice air traffic control lady at the tower was patient and understanding, and calm.
Aborting this takeoff was not not as bad as it sounds. I realized that I wasn't comfortable to get in the air right away, and there was still plenty of runway left to stop the airplane. Aborting takeoffs can become dangerous under certain circumstances. The longer you wait, the more dangerous it becomes to abort a takeoff, due to runway length, breaking distance, and being close to the airplane's rotation speed.
An interesting thing to note is that aborting takeoffs is much less common than aborting landings. Takeoffs are considered a more critical time than landings. This is because when landing, an airplane is already in the state it wants to be in - flying. The most stable state for an airplane to be in is flying high and fast. While landing does require the airplane to fly low and slow, it is still in a less critical state than the transition of an airplane on the ground, close to it's rotation (takeoff) speed. The airplane is not as stable at this time, and is actually close to a state of stalling.
Whoa, I went off on a tangent there. Anyway, I didn't get to fly today, but I did learn a valuable lesson - my own personal limits and comfort, while being faced with split-second decision making situations. These kinds of situations are hard to find, for me at least, in normal day to day life. It is why I love flying... It's like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna etc. And you better role with the punches.
I still have to talk to you about precautionary landings and forced landings - two procedure-heavy exercises with lots of big words and interesting maneuvers. We will cover these exercises in the next post, which I promise won't be too far off from now.
Thanks for reading.
Post-publication note: I've just been rudely informed that I have been accused of ripping off my girlfriends' blog in my first paragraph. To this, I can only respond by rejecting this false accusation and stating that I have never once actually read my girlfriends' blog. I just tell her I do, because she's so needy that way. Read her blog though, it's a good one.
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