Springing

It definitely feels like Spring today! The trees are starting to bloom, the winds were calm it was warm and I was just in a t-shirt, and the sun was so bright. It was so nice. Spring really does feel like a rebirth, an awakening.

I was out at the airport by 7:45 am, to fly with a former student who got his Private with us, then went to Ohio to work on his Instrument rating. His instructor left, so he's in between CFIs at the moment, so he came back here to fly with us and fine tune stuff. His radios, operating in busy airspace, etc.  I had him hand fly the whole time, and sure enough, he was used to putting on the autopilot and flying everything that way, but he said he knew if he came back here we'd make him hand fly too.  Yup. You get to use the autopilot AFTER you're good at hand flying it.  ;)  We went to South Bend, a nice busy Class C airport, and they really boffed our approach. They brought us in a mile from the Final Approach Fix at 4000' (we should've been at 2400'), fast, tight, blew us through the course so we had to get a vector 30° to the left of it to get back on course, power out and dive down fast and completely unstabilized.  It was an awful set up to an approach for a student. But I helped him and we managed it, and then came back in and did the ILS 23 at Kokomo, circle to land Runway 14. Good stuff, and done in time for lunch, which was the only good thing about being up that early.

After lunch I went back up in the RG with Isabel to work on the ILS 23 at Kokomo, introducing it for the first time, doing all the procedures.  A couple of rounds later, it was warming up outside and getting bumpier, so she had enough and we landed after just over an hour.

I went to the post office to pick up my new car's license plate registration tags from the mail, filled up my car with gas, and stopped at Dairy Queen to pick up a giant Oreo Blizzard for Ann.  Got her dinner and meds, then headed back out to the airport to fly with someone in the 172. He isn't my normal student, but he contacted me because he said he was up flying solo the other night and just felt "wrong" and uncomfortable, and put the plane away early, and called me to go fly. I asked if something happened and he said no, but when I dug a little more, he said he wanted to work on short field landings and slips to landing. Said he never slipped by himself and couldn't get himself to hold 60 kts on final for short field. Ergo, I figured he's probably just not comfortable with the lower end of the envelope on the airplane's performance, that he's worried he's going to lose control of it.  So instead of starting with short field landings and slips to landing like he asked, I had him take us up to 2500' and we did minimum controllable airspeed, flying around at 40 knots with the stall horn going off the whole time without actually stalling, and showing him he's 20 knots faster than that on final even on the short field landing.  I had him do that for awhile, then go ahead and put it into a fairly steep bank and stall it like that, to keep control. Then slips with full rudder tracking a road, etc.  I had him come back to Kokomo and do a normal landing at 60 knots instead of 65, and then the spot/short field landings, and then the slips to landings. He started off leaving it on the runway until the nosewheel was shimmying and landing flat, another sign he wasn't comfortable at the envelope of the airport, but by the end he was doing great, hitting his spot on short field, stall horn on for the landing, and feeling a lot more comfortable. So that was good, mission accomplished.  :)

I left the airport around 7:30 pm, and got home by 8. Dishes, laundry, house bills, Ann's bills, scheduling some stuff, and working on my CFI renewal have been what's on tap since then.  My CFI renewal isn't due until 7/31, but you can do it several months early and keep your same expiration month, and summer gets super busy for us, so I usually do it in May just to get it out of the way.  Unlike Steve who sent his in the day it expired and hoped nothing glitched.  *shakes head* ;) Anyway, I'm up to "Lesson 4". After Lesson 6 I have to take a big quiz, then do another 7 lessons and take the final quiz.   Yay...

Kaylee was quite pleased because she negotiated something with her job. First, right now she is an intern. But starting after she graduates, she is being hired for a paid position. It's $12/hour, which isn't great but isn't as bad as she thinks. She was getting $18/hr as an intern last summer but that's not the norm. Anyway, it was supposed to be something like 14 hour days, 3 days on and 4 days off.  She negotiated instead to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week.  They said that then they couldn't provide housing for her like they do for the other house 'parents' who stay with these at risk girls in these houses. She said that this wasn't going to work for her because if she had to drive from Kokomo and back every day, she couldn't afford it for $12/hour. So they agreed, and they are providing an apartment for her, rent free, utilities included, to live in while she works there.  That's a pretty sweet deal, actually. She was pleased with herself, and told her dad "See, I listen to you too".  lol  Other than college dorms, this will be her first apartment of her own. It's good, I think it's better that she have her own place over living here at home full time anyway.  She's old enough, she needs her own space.

That's about it for now. Tomorrow is a beautiful weather day and I only have two flights scheduled, in the afternoon. I might have to go up and do my own thing too.  I should drag somebody along...