Looking To The Sky

Above The Clouds

Note: This shot wasn’t taken when I was flying. I didn’t have my camera and I was busy flying an airplane, so I didn’t get a shot, but it was something like this.

Yesterday, after canceling a flight on Monday, I was able to go flying and boy was it beautiful.

I didn’t expect to go flying since the fog was out in Portland.  Thankfully, as I drove to Twin Oaks, the skies got pretty clear around the airport.

After prepping the plane and talking with Rick, we took off from Twin Oaks and headed towards the clouds.  We ended up getting to 3,000ft before reaching the clouds which happened to be plenty of legal clearance.

The view above the clouds was remarkable.  As we flew towards McMinnville airport (MMV), the clouds were still covering the area.  Amazingly enough though, there were some holes in the clouds which gave us the opportunity we needed to get under the clouds and practice some landings.

This was one of the coolest things I’ve done flying.  Timing it to avoid going through clouds and maneuvering the plane to move through the hole we were flying towards and getting down before the cloud flew over.

Thankfully the wind wasn’t too strong that day so it made this pretty easy.

After getting down I practiced some landings into McMinnville.  All of these went pretty smoothly.  A little rough on the edges, but overall they were great.  I was happy with my progress.

We took off out of MMV after a few landings there and spent time practicing stalls of all sorts.  Did some power-off stalls, power-on stalls, and some turning stalls.  It had been a bit for stalls, but they went well after taking some time to get into things.

The rest of the flight was getting back into our altitude to fly over the clouds, and to do some landings at Twin Oaks.  I did two of them there, and they went great.  A little quick here and there, but on a whole they were just dandy.

I felt much better this flight compared to the last one because it felt that I was connecting more with Rick and feeling that he had a much better understanding about where I was at in my training.

The next lessons will be getting me prepared for cross country flights.  These sound like a lot of fun, but I’m realizing that they’re also gonna cost some big bucks!  Oh well, I knew this wasn’t going to be cheap.

That’s the things with dreams and goals, sometimes they can get very expensive, but what you get out of them is totally worth the price.

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What dreams do you plan on completing?   What are your estimated costs?  Leave a comment below with your answers.

Logs:

Flight Time: 1.5 Hours
Ground Time: 1.1
Landings: 5

Categories: Private Pilot Completion

Tags: Cessna 172, flying, K7S3, KMMV, Maneuvers, N2108Y, Stalls, Training, Weather

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