Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Cocked. locked, and ready to...

The ways of this world can be very mysterious. I have chosen what is considered by many to be the premiere flight school in the seven county metro area. The first hurdle I faced in actually flying was weather related, which, considering where I live (frozen Midwest) and considering how weather dependent flying can be, is not surprising or improbable. The second time I selected a time for my first flight, I came to the flight school and found out that my flight instructor is not checked out in the Cessna 152 that I'm signed up to fly in. The flight school supervisor insisted that he'd get checked out quickly and I could be in the air lickety split. Fine.

That was Saturday, and Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning went by without a word. So, "screw it" I said and drove over there. I walked in and explained my situation to the dispatcher and as I was talking, the supervisor walked out to get a cup of coffee. He didn't even look at me - he just said "Ok Keith, go ahead and yell at me." I walked over and said "Bill, I'm not here to yell. I'm here to learn. What is the situation and how can we fix it?" The short version is that they did what they should have done to begin with...they assigned me another instructor and scheduled me for a flight at 1430 this afternoon. Excellent!

I get to the flight school and the new instructor helps me preflight the 152 and go through the checklist for everything. We get into the plane, fire everything up, and taxi to the runway. We turned into the wind and began our engine run-up, and the checklist says to switch the magneto selector from "Both" to "R" and then "L". "R" (right) is ok but "L" makes the engine drop 300 rpm and run very rough. My instructor tried running it at 1700 RPM at full lean to clear a fouled plug but nothing he could do made it run better. So we taxied back to the school and he says "well I'll preflight the other 152 real quick and we'll get in the air yet today".

Well, we met the other 152 heading out to the runway so that was the end of that. The good news is that I'm on the schedule for tomorrow again and their 152's don't get a lot of heavy use so it shouldn't affect my training much.

But I remain confident that someday I will fly a plane...

3 comments:

Jim said...

WOW!!!

I can not think of anything else that could keep you on the ground. I am thinking at this point, the best way to alleviate your frustration and pain would be a nice healthy tuition cut or maybe some extra fly time to make up for all this B.S.

I feel for ya.

Keith K. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Keith K. said...

I don't think they were too happy about yesterday - they know I got a little crabby about my first instructor and they were hoping that they'd gotten me back on track. But I (attempt) to fly again in 4 hours 1 minute so hopefully we'll be jumping off the deck and shoving into overdrive!