Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Somewhere beyond the sea...

The other day I mentioned "good news," but never finished the thought. That day, I had my flight evaluation with the chief instructor. It went well; by some miracle I demonstrated a respectable entry into autorotation.

The procedure calls for a rapid "Left hand down, right foot forward, right hand back," to settle into a controlled, engine-less descent. It's a precise sequence.

Going into the evaluation, I'd never done it without hands-on assistance, so my procedure that morning was "Left hand down, right foot forward, right hand back, pray." The helicopter cooperated, and I passed, clearing me for solo flight.

Which brings me to this morning: I flew for the first time by myself!

My instructor and I did a short flight to begin, then he got out and cut me loose to fly around the airport a few times. On the radio, I introduced myself as a first-timer, so the control tower was kind enough to slow their machine-gun chatter to a more intelligible pace.

See if you can spot the use of ETL in this video. There's nobody in the bird but me, and a beautiful day for it indeed.

[Edit: This video was originally set to music, Bobby Darin's "Somewhere Beyond the Sea." It was much better that way, but the copyright authorities objected. Oh well, just sing along in your head.]