My Flying Story Part 5: First Lessons

One of my favorite views…sunshine over the cornfields

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

When people found out I was interested in taking flying lessons, they’d ask me, “So are you going to do it?  are you going to get your license?”.  For several months I’d just say, “Well, maybe… I’m hoping to!”  Finally, sometime in March or April I decided I wasn’t going to hope anymore…I was GOING to!

 

I didn’t see how it was all going to work out, but in so many ways God kept confirming to me to move forward, and that He would provide.

 

I wanted to have all of my ducks in a row, and have every dollar saved up that I needed, but then I realized that I just needed to begin.  I told a friend that I think God gave me enough money to go forward, but not all of it at once so that I’d still depend on Him 😉

 

The verses God gave me to study this year is Isaiah 66:9-14.  I like to take verses ‘apart’ by seeing what each of the words mean, and then put them ‘back together’ again with my own ‘paraphrase’.   Through studying these verses, I’ve been discovering how rich God is in toward us…spiritually, materially, emotionally…He has everything we need and is eager to give it to us 🙂

 

 “That you might be able, and have the liberty to draw from and ‘suck’ in the goodness and richness of Jesus, and to become and remain FULLY satisfied, gratified to the utmost, furnished to the fullest extent of your desires.  And may you be comforted, and strengthened and refreshed by His love.

That you may drink deeply, to the last drop, and remain continuously delighted, enjoying and excited by the promise and expectation of His goodness. (I like that, expectation of His goodness!)

For His goodness and richness and love and glory towards you is easy to be seen, easy to find, more than enough, heavier than you can carry away, abounding and overflowing.  It sparkles and flashes like a magnificent diamond.

 

“Right now the Lord is promising, “Look this way!  pay attention to what I’m about to do!  for I have the power and resources  to carry this out! and of a surety I absolutely will!  I will deliver, and purposefully bend the river of My Peace to flow over you.  It will be spread out all around you. ”

Is. 66:11-12, my paraphrase

 

These verses, along with so many more things, have shown me, and keep showing me that He is for me 🙂

 

I think it was my second or third lesson, I was up in the air, learning how to fly the airplane, and I thought, “I can’t believe that I’m actually taking flying lessons!”  Then my next thought was, “Snap out of it Jessica, Ted’s trying to tell you something…pay attention!”  Lol!

 

“78Quebec” with the tow bar

 

I was very proud of myself the first time I pre-flighted the airplane and pulled it out of the hangar by myself.  You have to pull it out by hand with a tow bar, and when I do it by myself, I have to tug a few times to get it rolling 😀  You definitely don’t ‘drive’ it out of the hangar like you drive your car out of the garage.

 

I started keeping a journal specifically for my flying.  It started out as a notebook to write down things I needed to remember from each lesson, but it grew into a journal.  I know it’ll be fun to go back and read it someday 🙂

 

This most perfect journal was given to me by my friend Allison 🙂

 

June 7th 2015

I’m ‘on top of the world’ right now 😀  I got to fly two days in a row.  I learned basic maneuvers (turns, descents, climbs, taxiing),  slow flight, takes offs and landings, and steep turns <<I like those!

 

June 13th, 2015

I had fun today 🙂  We did power-off stalls and power-on stalls.  It was weird to feel the plane buffet and shake 🙂 The power-on stall was especially exciting-my left wing dropped and it seemed to be more shaky.

Today was the first time he didn’t say anything to me about pulling the nose up on takeoff.  I did it by myself!  That one time, that is! 😀

 

A stall is when the airplane doesn’t have enough air going over the wing properly to create lift.  First you hear this annoying sound which is the stall warning horn, then the airplane shakes a little, and if you would let it go long enough, it would start dropping.  To recover, the first thing you do is lower the nose. At about the same time you push in the throttle all of the way.  Ted told me that when he taught Daddy stalls, Daddy pushed the nose down a lot farther than he needed to, which made it rather exciting, and he said, “I don’t know if your dad remembers that, but I do!”

So when it was time for me to learn how to recover from a stall, Ted teased me and asked if I was going to do the same thing 😀  I didn’t, but later, I pulled the knob for the carburetor heat and it was stiff, so my hand slipped and jerked off of it.  Ted teased, “Don’t go pulling controls out of the plane or you really will freak me out!”  Lol!

 

I remember it was a struggle for a while to be able to ‘feel’ where I was in relation to the airport as we went around and around the pattern practicing take offs and landings.  I kept wanting to ‘hug’ the airport 😀

 

June 19th, 2015

Feel better about landings 🙂 Have a better feel for where I am in relation to the airport 🙂

 

June 20th, 2015

Flares!  Knowing how close to the ground I am.  Need to look up and down runway, not just stare at one place.

He said that I did a couple of more landings by myself.

I bounced one landing 😛

 

 

Sometime in June we had an ‘airplane wash day’ to get the airplanes all cleaned up for our pancake breakfast fly-in.  My sisters teased when they saw I had written “airplane wash day” on the calendar, but then I pointed to the “llama wash day” just a few Saturdays before that, lol! 😀   It’s fun being with the club members whether we’re washing planes, flipping pancakes, or just together for the monthly meetings…they’re always having fun, teasing, and joking.  And they did plenty while we washed the airplanes.

I was sitting cross legged underneath the tail of one of the planes, washing the elevator, and someone started spraying the plane with the hose, which was starting to get me wet!  I looked behind me and saw Jim (my ground instructor) and Bob (the club secretary) laughing.  😀

 

The meeting that the club voted me in, they were especially ornery!  There were more members in attendance that night than usual, and there was a lot of teasing going on, from laughing about Bob’s reading glasses breaking in the middle of the meeting, to teasing people about going in the wrong door when someone went into the closet where we keep the chairs.  At one point Jim turned to me and said, “Are you sure you want to join this club?!”

I was sure!  It was just another version of the joking and teasing my sisters and I do to each other 😀

 

If learning how to fly isn’t fun enough, Ted’s sense of humor and teasing make it even more fun 😀  Like I said before, my sisters and I tease each other all of the time, plus we tease and joke around with our parents, too, so if there wasn’t any teasing going on, it would be kind of boring!

 

Once another instructor, Tom, was teaching his student at the same time Ted was giving me a lesson.  We followed each other around the pattern several times, practicing take offs and landings 🙂   Tom was looking at the airspeeds in our airplane to compare them with the airplane they were using.  He was trying to write in a notebook, and it made me laugh when he suddenly said, “Here, let me go to my desk!”  and he walked to the back and set his notebook on the horizontal stabilizer (the flat horizontal part of the tail).  It’s perfect desk height when you’re standing 😀

I started my airplane just a few seconds before they started theirs, and Ted teased, “Your start was better than his!  I’m so proud of you!”  Lol!

 

I flew…no wait…I DO fly…every chance that I get!  After the club finished washing the airplanes, Ted asked if I wanted to go up for a lesson.  I think he knew the answer already, because when I said that I did, he laughed and replied, “Of course you do!”  That was a windy, cloudy day, and we literally went bumping around the pattern and just barely kept out of the clouds 😀  At one point it was so bumpy my head hit the ceiling of the airplane, lol!

One time a lady told me, “From someone who gets nervous when I hit the tiniest bit of turbulence in a big jet, what is it about flying that you enjoy so much?”  I thought a little bit and said, “Well, I like turbulence…”  Lol!   However, I have discovered that when I’m the one responsible for the airplane, I don’t like the turbulence quite as much as when I know there is another capable pilot in charge 🙂

 

 

 

There were lots of times that all of the information that I was trying to assimilate seemed overwhelming, but never so much that I wasn’t still having fun!  I tried to remind myself, “You felt just like this when you started driving, and now you can drive almost without thinking.” 🙂  I also reminded myself to not worry too much about ‘everything I still had to learn’, but just focus on the ‘bite sized pieces’ that Ted was giving me at that time.

 

I really like Ted’s teaching style…he never lets me get by with just ‘good enough’, teaches me how to do it ‘like the professionals do’,  and is always encouraging (and teasing) me along the way 🙂

 

Learning how to fly has been SO. MUCH. FUN!

 

It has become so normal to go sailing through the sky twice or three times a week…seeing the fields and houses and roads from that perspective has become so regular.   Then every once in a while I stop and think, “Am I actually FLYING?! Is this really my life?!  Do I really get to do this?!!!”

Yes!  Yes I do!  And I am thoroughly enjoying it!

 

 

 

-to be continued!-

 

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