It was time for another visit to the Castle site, so I scheduled another milk run for Thursday. My friend Art was available, and since he is training for his IFR it was a good opportunity to spend some time under the hood and some time as pilot-in-command for a cross-country flight. (You need fifty...

I’ve been watching my logbook total hours for the past couple weeks, just waiting for this to happen. I finally passed the three hundred fifty hour mark. That’s critical. There’s a book called “The Killing Zone” which is an examination of private pilot accident statistics. The hours between forty...

That's my lap as I fly from Oxnard (OXR) back to Santa Monica (SMO). I took off through a thin layer of clouds. On my right knee is my miniZ kneeboard (from ZuluWorks), where I have copied my clearance and I have the Hobbs time and ATIS written down. Little pilot notes. On my left knee is the book...

If you click on that it should get larger. That's me in the plane at Paso Robles, about to fire up the engine to go out for my instrument check ride. The designated examiner is sitting next to me. My heart is pounding and my blood pressure is probably in the unsafe zone.

I wasn't sure if it was worth paying my CFII to accompany me up to the check ride. I went back and forth about it. The check ride was schedule for Tuesday, October 24 at 11am. It was going to be up at Paso Robles, about an hour and a half flight from Santa Monica. I watched the weather for a week...

On the eve of my instrument check ride, I will write about yet another VFR rated pilot flying in marginal weather conditions. With a little luck (and all my hard work since April) tomorrow evening I will no longer be a VFR rated pilot. Why did (another) Yankee baseball player die in a plane crash?...

Previously, the most exciting thing that happened during a lesson is when the wind picked up the tail of the Cherokee while I was starting my flare for landing. If my instructor had not been in the right seat, I might have bent the nose gear. (Now I am alert for this sort of gust as I am landing....

There are just a couple things left to do to get my instrument rating. Today I completed my IFR cross country flight. It had to be at least two hundred fifty nautical miles, have three different kinds of approaches, and I had to visit three airports. I arrived at the airport at 8:15am, leaving Nell...

It isn’t really the surly bonds of earth that bother me anymore, it’s the damn clouds. More specifically, the clouds which cover airports and keep the airplanes on the ground. It doesn’t keep all the airplanes on the ground, just those flown by pilots do not yet have instrument ratings.

Adam hasn't written into the blog in a while, but he has good reason. This is Eleanor Elektra Lehman, his daughter. She already has a headset (well, earmuffs), and has already flown across the continent. In a couple weeks she's going to fly to Hawaii. She's only been around a month, but she's...