March Update

A slow start

The students are all back in school, but we’re off to a bit of a slow start. The first part of the semester was meant to finish up some of the training that the weather didn’t allow us to do before winter. This included tail wheel training for several students, a few flights at night, and some flying in the airplane with retractable landing gear.

We started flying the tail wheel airplane, a two seat Decathlon, but after a few days of feeling pretty bad by the last flight I put a Carbon Monoxide detector in the plane. Turns out it was bringing quite a bit of Carbon Monoxide into the cabin. Usually this would be caused by a problem in the heating system, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The mechanics are trying to make sure the engine compartment and cabin are properly sealed off, hopefully it will be ready to go on Monday

The weather is still a bit of a factor so we haven’t been able to get too many night flights done. Cold night temperatures and cloudy/rainy/foggy weather don’t make for great flying conditions for a small airplane. We have had a few nights with scattered high clouds so we take advantage of those.

Moody bought a used C-182 RG for retractable landing gear training, but it needed a new engine installed before we started training students in it (they got a good price for it since the engine had so many hours on it). That work should be done soon and hopefully by the end of next week we’ll be flying it.

In the mean time we’re working with the student’s on their commercial pilot ground school. There’s a lot of information to be learned for their check ride later this semester. They are also involved in the maintenance projects in the hangar, I’ve been turning a wrench a bit too!

My first loop!

Last week Moody hosted a two day flying safety seminar. One of the speakers was Clarke McNease from APS Emergency Maneuver Training in Phoenix. He taught for about 4 hours on “upset recovery”, which is essentially how to control the airplane in unusual situations. I was able to do 2 flights with him to put some of his techniques into practice. We would turn the airplane upside down and descending toward the ground and I would roll it upright and climb back away from the ground (we were really high up and never got anywhere near the ground). We also did some aerobatics to learn what the airplane can do and be more confident in it. It was a lot of fun and a great learning opportunity! Moody is considering bringing some of the training into the curriculum and if they do I’m hoping I can be part of that and spend more time with Clarke to be able to teach the material myself.