Flight training time

My lovely wife got me a first training lesson at a local flying club. It's quite impressive timing that our day was so calm for having been blowing +20mph for the past two weeks... We stayed at 2500ft and flew locally in the SFZ north of Washington DC. Having flown general aviation so infrequently and only at uncontrolled airports, it was interesting to actually have to file a flight plan. But it wasn't that bad actually.

Once getting to know me a bit, my instructor-for-the-day Oren walked me through the pre-flight checklist and we taxied to the runway. I was interested as I got a good walk-through of the engine run-up, hearing how to use carb heat and what to look for with the instruments. We taxied out and the takeoff was a piece of cake. It's funny how temperatures in the 30's helped the performance. We were at 2500ft in no time. Oren said "alright, plane is yours" and I avoided the rookie mistake of trying to do anything. Heh, new RC pilots have the same tendency of immediately jamming a stick to the side when given the controller for the first time. So I basically let the plane fly itself. It's stable, why do anything?

It has been a while since I flew, but it was easy to pick back up. Oren asked me to do some turns and fly to headings. Not bad. It's a lot to remember, watching airspeed, keeping track of altitude, remembering to glance for my heading... not hard to keep the plane in the air though. That was apparently easy enough, Oren suggested doing some slow flying. He put in some flaps, had me pull the throttle back (whoa cool, I moved the throttle!) and I worked to figure out the new pitch attitude to maintain airspeed. A couple gentle turns got me some feel of the difference of flaps being down. Well, time to pull them back up and go back to the airport. I got to put us in the pattern, but then it was back to the pro for base and final.

Not bad for a random snowy day!

From the perspective of Goat, I have no fears that I can pick up the skills. I'm thinking of doing the same in a glider and making sure to request some good stalls and spin recovery to get familiar with the entries in particular. Welcome back motivation!

Fixing a canoe

Canoe believe (heh, love the water humor) that I took a break from the plane to work on a boat? Okay, it really only took a half-day. First was to flake off any loose fiberglass from the last repair, meaning most of it. Next was to clean up any poky sharp bits. I used the edge of a chisel to put some deep scratches in the area where the repair cloth was going to go. The rear damage actually had a full hole into the boat. For this, I mixed up a small cup of resin thick with cabosil and then tried some chopped strands. The resulting blob was a tarball that would slowly ooze off the stirring stick. I stuffed this into the hole, taped over the hole with masking tape, and flipped the boat over to let the epoxy settle into the el-cheapo masking tape mold. Worked like a charm! I had a little run-out where the masking tape wasn't perfect, but knocking off the sharp edges with a chisel did the trick. While the epoxy was still green, we started putting on layers, bringing resin up through the cloth by putting raw epoxy down first and using squeegies to mash the cloth into the resin and ensure it was fully wetted. I forget already, but we put some 8-10 layers of 6oz tooling cloth in the damaged areas and feathered out from there. The last layer was a large piece to tie everything together and give a nice finish. It didn't need to be smooth since the rest of the bottom of the boat is scuffed up from years of use, so I left raw 6oz print.

I haven't tried one of these slide shows before, so please ping me if it fails...

Goat is slowing down until I have more space to build a wing... I'm hopeful for early summer to have a basement or at least a dedicated room. Fingers crossed ;-)