Flight Log 02-01

After almost two weeks and five weather cancelations, I got to go again. The weather didn't look promising at all, but it was close engough - 'Marginal Flight Rules' is the term. In the words of my instructor, we were only going today "because it's a good learning experience." They want to put me in the soup so I know how miserable it can be. Todays lesson was to cover climbs, turns, descents, and combinations of those fundamentals. The wind was out of the south, and the METAR report said visibility was 5 nm and the clouds were at 2400' - low, but close enough.

No traffic on this foggy day; we took off runway 16 and headed northwest. My instructions were to climb up and level off at 2000', but as we crossed through 1800 everything started to go white. We floated along in the clouds for a minute or so, hoping it was just one cloud and we'd fly out the other side. Dave remarked that I was doing an exceptional job holding right at 2000 and on heading. After a while I was ordered to get below the clouds and turn back home. No lesson today, just up and down, out and back. Dave called in to the tower to let them know they need to update the weather report then got our landing clearance. With little traffic we came right into the base leg (90 degree angle from the approach end of the runway) and I steered it around and put the plane down on the runway. "Good job watching those instruments today" was Dave's comments. I went through the shutdown checklist, tied down the plane, and headed back inside.

Not much to debrief for this flight. I pulled out my logbook for a grand entry of 0.6 hours... over half of which was just checklist work and taxiing. Dave took a pause and thumbed through my logbook, then looked up at me, slightly astonished. "This was only your second flight?" "Yes sir..." He looked back down: "and you made two landings on your first?" "Yes sir..." (Should I not have?) He made his entry and told Bill, the owner, that he needs to go fly with me sometime - I had been flying IFR like it was nothing. My ego was inflated like never before.

Flight #2a: 0.6 hrs
Total Log Time: 1.5 hrs