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El Cajon, California
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This place was Great
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Now Sunday was the interesting day. I only had one flight on Sunday at 1200. I got into the school about 1145 ready to do my pre-flight checks, found the plane I was going to fly and got started on those. Then we had a nice big commotion. A plane was circling the airfield directly over the runway (which doesn't normally happen, they normally go 3 sides of a rectangle and then land). I'll try and get a picture as there are some very good ones but the plane had 2 wheels. One on it's right wing, and one on the nose. The left one had fallen off mid flight (and crashed into someone's house waking him up a bit suddenly - he was kind enough to return said wheel) and so landing was going to be a bit tricky. The plane was originally circling to burn off some fuel, but as it had been refuelled before take off, it would have taken about another 6 hours to burn it off, and fuel is generally safer as fuel than fuel vapour in a plane anyway so unless you can burn it all off it's just easier to land. Assuming you still have all your wheels that is. Thankfully an instructor was in the plane with the student so could take control. The lot of us on the ground were all wondering what on earth you'd be doing if that was your first solo flight! The instructor actually did an amazing landing. He managed to keep the left wing up right until the end of the run and land the plane on just the 2 good wheels. He only dropped the wing at the last minute and it was so good that we could even use the runway the plane had been landed on an hour and a half later when I flew back into the field. I got up about 1300 and did stalls, slow flight, steep turns again. I'd pretty much got the hang of takeoffs (it's pretty much point and go with as much power as you can get out of the plane), so we started on the landing part of touch and go's as well. It's kind of hard to get and I'm still working on it as of Tuesday but the good news is even from the start I'm not landing on the nose (which is very very bad), I'm just landing with all 3 wheels at the same time. After a while though I got really ill and had a vomit reflex in the middle of a take-off so I had to cut my flight short, though I still got 1 hour to go in my log book. It did mean that I couldn't go into downtown San Deigo like I was intending to though.
Jack (the cute guy) also passed his Instrument Rating today, so had a barbeque party to celebrate. About 10 of us were there. Me, Jean who I share my apartment with, T, Jack obviously, my instructor, Fabian (who was the student in the plane), Tom, Hobbs, Ash who had just got 100hours that day so had finished the hour building he wanted and was off to spend 2 days on the beaches surfing before he flies back to the UK, and some others that I forget about. We had a good night and soon enough the drinking games started, we messed up all the links on Jack's computer for him cause we're friendly like that. After more than my fair share of alcohol I left them at 0130 due to a headache and feeling very tired from being ill earlier. Jean got in about 0230 and they were still going so god knows what happened to the rest of them. I know we sent some of them out at 0100 for a beer restocking, after having exhausted the supply of burgers.
Posted
Aug 22, 2006
by edders
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