Yesterday, after exactly two months on the ground, I finally managed to get back in an airplane. I had joined the flying club, The Flying 64th, several weeks ago, but it wasn't until yesterday that I had time to schedule a checkout flight with one of their instructors to get comfortable with their planes.

We went up in the Cessna 150, the small two-seater with a tiny 100-hp engine. I was worried that it was going to feel as foreign as my experience flying the Cessna 182 in Atlanta, but (maybe because I had already had some exposure to Cessna-style push/pull controls) the operation of the airplane's controls pretty quickly faded to the background and I was able to focus on the flying itself, and so it went pretty well. I told him ahead of time that, because there were so many variables here that were different than where I had trained, I figured it might take several flights before I was ready to fly on my own, and I assured him that I wasn't in a hurry to get signed off before he thought I was ready. He agreed that that was the right attitude.

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When I was in Knoxville last month, I checked out two of the local flying clubs. Knoxville Flyers has about 250-members and three planes, and is based at DKX, the Downtown Airport. Sky Ranch only has something like 100 members and two airplanes, and they have their own private grass strip on an island in the river that passes through Knoxville.

Between the two, I had pretty much decided on Sky Ranch. The initiation fee was a little cheaper ($225 vs $350 for Knox Flyers), and the monthly fee was cheaper too ($35 vs $56). Their hourly rates were a little more expensive ($50/hr for the Cessna 150 and $70/hr for the Cessna 172, vs $46/hr and $68/hr respectively at Knox Flyers), but pretty close overall. Both clubs have the policy that if you take an airplane on a trip, you need to pay at least two hours' worth of rental fees for each day the plane is gone, whether you actually flew it that day or not. That policy is what would make trips unfeasible — at $50/hr, the plane rental for a round trip flight to Clemson (one hour each way) would only cost $100, but if I went for a week I'd end up having to pay for 2 x 7 = 14 hours' worth, so the trip would cost $700 instead of $100. But it still seemed like the best option around.

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