Today I got two exercises in aeronautical decision-making, for free!

I was scheduled to do my long solo cross-country flight, flying from Hammond to Baton Rouge, then to Lafayette, then back to Hammond; about 170 miles in all. We had to cancel on Friday because the weather has continued to be crap as it has been for the past few weeks, but as I awoke this morning I found that there wasn't a single cloud in the sky. It was like a magical little window had been opened up in the never-ending series of summer thunderstorms, just for me. It looked like I'd actually get to go up to my planned altitude (4500 feet westbound and 5500 feet eastbound), where the air is nice and cool, rather than sweating it out at 2000 feet to stay under the clouds, like I had to do on my first solo cross-country flight to Gulfport.

I drove eagerly to the airport, Mike reviewed my navigation planning, and he bid me bon voyage. I did my pre-flight inspection, called and filed my flight plan, started up the plane, waved to Mike, and set off on my adventure.

It wasn't five minutes before I had my first little test of decision-making skills. When the weather is as hot as it is here, we typically taxi with the door cracked open — a little bit of the propwash makes its way into the cabin and it's like sitting in front of a big industrial-size fan. When the weather is 95°F and you have no air conditioning, it feels pretty nice.

So today I did just that. And halfway down the taxiway, a gust blew the door open a little wider, and I got a nice little demonstration of Bernoulli's Principle (when air speeds up, it drops in pressure). My navigation log, with all my checkpoints and headings and calculations, was crisply sucked out the door. So what do you do when you're the only one in an airplane, on an active taxiway, and you lose a crucial piece of paper? That wasn't covered in ground school.

Fortunately, there was nobody else taxiing behind me, so I just gave a radio call saying I was going to be stopping on the taxiway for a minute, shut down the engine, and jumped out and ran back to grab the paper, which fortunately had stayed put and hadn't gone blowing off halfway across the airport. If I hadn't been able to retrieve it, or if there'd been a business jet behind me burning hundreds of dollars of fuel a minute, I guess I would have had to just keep going to the end of the taxiway (there wasn't anywhere to pull off and turn around), then taxi back up the runway and go back to the flight school and do my calculations again.

But fortunately, I didn't have to do that, and I got back in the plane, started up the engine, and made it down to the end of the runway. Before taking off, I stopped and did my runup, which involves holding the brakes and throttling up the engine and performing various tests to be sure everything is working as expected. Except this time, I found that not everything was — the ammeter showed zero, which indicated that the alternator wasn't producing any charge and the plane was running off of the battery.

This was a dilemma, because that gauge has always acted flaky — often when we do the runup, it will stay stuck on a given setting, not changing when various electrical loads are switched on, as it's supposed to. But if you flipped the alternator switch off, it would always drop down to zero as expected, which means that it was working, and the alternator was producing a charge.

This time, however, the gauge was at zero, and no combination of switch-flipping would get it to change. It was tempting to forge on anyway, assuming that the gauge was just stuck again, but with it indicating zero, I just wasn't comfortable making that assumption. The motto, "better safe than sorry," has always been a favorite of mine, and even more so when "sorry" means "plummeting to my death," so I sighed and taxied back to the flight school.

As it turned out, the alternator was in fact bad and the plane was running solely off the battery. Hey, look at that, firsthand confirmation of the lesson that caution is always the best policy.

Mike talked to the mechanic, who asked him to fly the plane up to Sycamore, the mechanic's small private grass strip, so he could fix the plane. Mike invited me to come along. I asked how safe it was to fly an airplane that is known to have a bad alternator, and he explained that it's only a ten-minute flight to Sycamore, and the battery will last about an hour without the alternator running, and that the battery doesn't power the engine anyway — it is solely there to power the radios and some of the instruments. So even if the battery were to fail, the plane would happily continue flying, we just wouldn't be able to talk to anyone. And since there's no tower to talk to at that airstrip, that's not a problem. It's completely legal to fly an airplane that doesn't even have radios installed in that airspace.

So we flew up to Sycamore, and I got to do another soft- and short-field landing, and then Mike and I hung out for about an hour while Steve and Keith installed a new alternator. I took advantage of the time to walk around and take some pictures, and to talk to Steve and Keith about working on airplanes. When the new alternator was installed and the airplane was working nicely again, we flew back down to Hammond. So I didn't get to do my long cross-country, but I did get to spend an hour relaxing in a pleasant setting out in the country, and I got some free flight time to stick in my logbook.

On the downside, it turns out that the plane is now due for its mandatory 100-hour mechanical inspection, so even though they fixed the problem so quickly, the plane won't be available for a few days. And a few days is exactly how long this little window of nice weather is forecasted to last. Bah.