This morning I woke up up at 6 AM to the sounds of a thunderstorm. "Great," I thought, "I probably wont be able to fly on my first day of flight school." Nevertheless, I got ready and drove to the airport. By the time I left, the storm had passed and the sky remained overcast. Upon arriving, I went inside the FBO and found the place where I was supposed to meet my instructor, Matt. After making one another's acquaintances, we went out to the aircraft and completed the preflight items. Since it had been raining, the grass around the aircraft was wet, and there were numerous puddles, but I was able to keep my feet dry... well, at least for the first 30 seconds. After that I manged to step in approximately every puddle.
We boarded the aircraft, a Cessna 172R, and taxied out to runway 22. He asked if I wanted to do the takeoff, and I agreed to. I advanced the throttle to full power, and we began to accelerate down the runway. As we picked up speed, the airspeed indicator came alive and jumped up to 45 knots. Our speed continued rising, and when it hit 55 knots, liftoff speed, I pulled back on the yoke. The aircraft became light on its wheels, and we were lifting off, when suddenly a large bird, probably a hawk, decided to also take off from the middle of runway 22. A hawk's liftoff speed is much less than 55 knots, so with a thump, he collided with our aircraft. We continued the takeoff, and after we were stabilized in a climb, Matt said, "Well, there's your first birdstrike."
"Did we actually hit him?" I asked.
"Yep, there's his guts on the windshield. Poor guy," he said, pointing to the right side of the windscreen. Sure enough, some sort of transparent liquid was splattered on the side of the windscreen, flowing along with the wind as we continued accelerating.
We continued out to the practice area and practiced some climbs, descents, and turns. These were a piece of cake, so we did a few steep turns, banking the wings to 45 degrees from the horizon, and making a complete circle. Those were more of a challenge.
Then it was on to slow flight. We slowed the aircraft down and extended the flaps. Maintaining altitude, we decreased our speed until the stall horn began sounding. We stayed at this speed, doing turns, climbs, and descents with the stall horn buzzing until Matt said, "Enough of this nonsense, lets do some stalls."
I wasn't particularly looking forward to stalls because of the sharp drop off when the wing stops holding us up. Matt demonstrated the first one, and the drop off was not as bad as I had expected. So he handed the controls over to me, and had me do a few.
By the time we had practiced a few of those, it was nearly time to return the aircraft, so we headed back to the airport. We landed and taxied off the active runway, but since we had a few extra minutes, we turned around and taxied back to the end of the runway and took off again. We made one circuit around the traffic pattern and one more landing before taxiing back to the parking area and securing the aircraft.
Back inside the FBO, we completed the debriefing, and went through a bunch of paperwork. This included signing the aircraft rental papers and insurance forms, filling out the front page of the lesson plan book with my info, scheduling the next few flights, and applying for a student pilot certificate.
With all that out of the way, we took a break for lunch, and took off again, heading toward the practice area. This flight was much the same as the last, and soon the nose of the aircraft was pointing back to the airport again. We made a total of 3 landings, then parked and debriefed, and Matt gave me a tour of the facility.
After this, we switched to another aircraft, a Cessna 172S, for our final flight for the day. This time, the focus was on steep turns to begin with. After practicing those, we did a couple power-off stalls before moving on to ground reference maneuvers. We began this by picking out a small barn on the ground and flying circles around it. The wind was calm, so it was not too difficult. Next we practiced S-turns, making turns left and right across a highway. We were going to fly a rectangular pattern around a field, but the S-turns had messed with my equilibrium, and I was feeling a bit of motion sickness, so instead we returned to the airport and landed a few minutes early.
I really enjoyed the first day of training, and my instructor was impressed with how well I handled the aircraft. After the first flight, he jokingly said that I'm ready to take the checkride. I think I could complete the training relatively quickly, but I will have to wait to solo until I have my student pilot certificate, which could take 2-3 weeks.
Today's flying added 3.7 hours of flight time and 5 landings to my logbook, which brings the total to 7.7 hours and 14 landings.
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