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.

[Entry Continues...]