camwyn | (no subject)

Weather forecast for LWM this weekend has 'chance of thunderstorm' and '80-90% chance of precipitation'. Probably not going to schedule a flight lesson as I would rather not have a repeat of the week where Arthur's offshore presence meant I basically did a preflight check, taxied to the runway, checked the windspeeds, and then did a pre-landing check.

However, last weekend's flight lesson was interesting. The ground portion involved visiting the air traffic control tower to see what's involved in ATC at a municipal airport. Not gonna lie, it looked almost exactly like the interior of the Camp McCarran tower in Fallout New Vegas- to the point where I asked how long the airport and tower had been there, just to see if Lawrence tower had been built around the same time as RL McCarran. Apparently the Lawrence tower dates back to the 1980s, though.

The flight time itself was pretty good. I have to work on my turns- I tend to make them a little too tight. Not sure why, given that half the time I'm turning without an actual door between me and the rest of the world, but whatever. Hover practice is still tricky, but the instructor says I'm getting better, I just can't tell because we tend to practice on windy days. And I did get a decent spontaneous hover during one of our landing practice attempts, plus I'm doing somewhat better at talking to the tower (the ideal thing to do during these communications is cut out any extraneous words or syllables, since nobody else can reach the tower while you're talking to them). Still trying to memorize what's being said to me and repeat the relevant bits back the way I'm supposed to, though. That's a little rougher than I anticipated.

Once we were on the ground and I was paying my bill we had an interesting moment, though. I'm not sure how we got onto the subject, but I mentioned to the instructor that I tended to have a lot of swearing going on in my head when I did something that caused a problem or when I couldn't remember what I was supposed to do. He said that was fine and if I wanted to say any of it out loud that was okay, because he wanted to know if I was any good at swearing.

My Adrian Shephard headvoice went into evil cackle mode at that. Next actual flight lesson may be.... interesting.

(Oh, and the instructor who has celiac told me the chocolate chip cookies were the best he's had in years; apparently he's been forbidden from eating wheat since 2007 and has not had much luck with gluten-free baked goods. I pointed him at the photo tutorial I wrote up in case he wanted to take a stab at the recipe himself. It seemed to make him happy.)