Technology

This was the first morning in a couple of weeks that I didn't have to get up and head out to the airport right after I dropped Kaylee off from school. I kind of liked that! I still worked, I just did it at home until lunch time. Billing, mostly.

At 3:30, I took off in the C-172RG to head over to Muncie to give a lesson. We stayed in the pattern for awhile, then went off to work on instrument approaches. And for a lesson on why it's important to have a good foundation and not just follow the magenta GPS line, our Garmin 530 WAAS took a dive. The com quit working, the GPS couldn't find its position, it was displaying a page full of problems. It was useless. So it was time to go back to the basics, use the second radio and just shoot a good old fashioned ILS approach without a GPS. Can't identify that intersection that way any more. Have to start at the VOR. No pretty picture to look at, no WAAS telling you when to turn and drawing the track for you. I'm actually kind of liking this, but of course I'm the only one. ;) So while we're adapting to that, coming down final on the ILS, the glideslope doesn't come in on #2. Time to adapt again and just shoot a localizer approach. It made for a pretty good lesson, actually. Next time I want somebody to practice a basic approach without all the gizmos going and they say "Yeah, right, what are the odds of losing a perfectly good GPS", well, now I have ammo. ;) This could have happened in hard IFR. Would be good to know that the GPS is a handy tool and not the only tool a pilot is relying on...

So tonight I had my first on-line Formation Clinic ground school. John S. is hosting, and there are three of us trainees in the class. He's doing it through an online meeting, where you call in and log into a website, and your computer screen shows what he is doing on his screen. So he's got a PowerPoint presentation and a pdf document and we're going over the material remotely this way. Gotta love technology. :) We went for about an hour and a half tonight and made it through Chapter One. There are Six Chapters and four Appendix, and Chapter 1 is the easy chapter. ;) This is the Red Star groundschool, which is a lot more involved than the ABS (Baron/Bonanza) or the NATA (T-6) groundschools, but it's good to be thorough... Weather and life permitting, there will be a formation clinic nearby in November to work on the flying portion of things.

Steve and I woke up Kaylee every couple of hours last night to check on her. We went to bed around 1, Steve woke her up at 3, I woke her up at 5, and then I got her up at 7:30 or so. When I got her up this morning for good, she said "I thought you were going to wake me up last night!" I said "we did wake you up last night." She had no memory of it, which I guess is a good thing since we obviously didn't disturb her rest too awful much. ;) The bruise on her head isn't as bad looking as I expected it to be, but it's definitely a good-sized bonk. It hurt her to open her mouth or stretch her face much at all, so I gave her a little Tylenol for the first time, now knowing it wouldn't be masking a concussion pain or something. She's seemed fine ever since...