Some of you may have come here looking for Cori’s web log. You can find the address just to the left under Blog Roll.

What would you think if you saw muffin crumbs on a shelf in a porta-potty?  You would think that someone took a muffin in there and set it on the shelf and then took it out.  You would think someone intended to eat said muffin after it existed inside of a porta-potty.

I have two notes from this year’s hunt:

1. We “teamed up” on a coyote.  Actually, my father-in-law tagged her from 150 yards away with a shotgun and then we trailed her to a culvert.

2. We got a reminder of how hard-core my mom really is.

CP and I had an evening without the boys and had not planned anything specific so we decided to do some “window shopping” and wound up playing Rock Band for a half hour at Best Buy, just the two of us.  Now that’s a high quality cheap date!

During the last year or so, I have noticed that with increasing frequency, G and B have been coming home with these underground rhymes that I learned when I was in grade school. I think it was probably natural for me to assume as a child that these were just going around during my few years in grade school and we had discovered something new and it would peter out.  Yet these boys are coming home and repeating these rhymes (mostly verbatim) as I learned them and I know they didn’t learn them from us and assume the other boys didn’t learn them from their parents.  So they are passed from child to child through the generations.  Well, now I wonder whether my mom and dad ever noticed this phenomenon and whether my dad learned the same rhymes in grade school.  I shall be sure to ask, but I shall also list a few here because I believe the chances are that you learned these in grade school also:

1. “[So-and-so] and [so-and-so] sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”  (Yes, everyone knows that one.)
2. “Here comes the bride, big fat and wide.  Where is the groom?  He’s in the bathroom.”  (G and B did not know the next two lines, so I had to teach them.  “Why is he there?  He lost his underwear.  Where did it go?  He flushed it down the hole.”)
3. “Made ya’ look, made ya’ look, now you’re in my baby book.” (I learned it as, “made ya’ read a story book.”)
4. “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel and Joker got away.” (This one even made it into Batman the Animated Series and The Simpsons).
5. See if you can finish this one: “Deck the halls with gasoline, fa la la la la la la la la…”
6. What underground rhymes can you remember from the grade school playground?

Our last flying club meeting featured a tour of the Wittman Regional Airport control tower. How awesome is that?! G tagged along.  The airport manager, who is a member of our club, asked us whether we had ever been in the old tower, and I recalled being in that tower when I was G’s age or maybe younger.  I. was the controller on duty and he was delighted to have pilots visiting him.  We were even more pleased to meet him. G got to turn the runway lights on and off. A pilot may say that isn’t too big a deal, having already done it many times from the airplane, but I think for a 9 1/2 year old, and doing it from the control tower, that’s pretty sweet.  Things you probably didn’t know: 1. *Not* including Airventure traffic, Oshkosh is the third busiest airport in Wisconsin, behind Milwaukee and Madison.  2. You can listen to the Oshkosh control tower live on the web

Yesterday, almost one year since my first lesson, I took my flight test.  I was pretty relaxed about the thing, but by the end of the lesson, I was sweating and wondering how it was that I passed.  The oral test went fairly well, I think, and then it was time to make a go/no-go decision.  The winds were fairly high for me (210@13 gusting 19).  Well, runway 4-22 had been closed earlier in the week, so I was thinking we should have to use runway 27 and so was the examiner, K.  I discontinued the test because I did not want to do a short or soft field landing with that much of a cross wind.  But as I was about to leave, I realized that the NOTAMS had not indicated 4-22 was closed, only 18-36.  So we continued the test.

We started off on the cross-country towards Dubuque.  K pointed out to me that my number 2 navigation radio was not working properly and I should have backed it up by the number 1 and by the GPS.  We diverted towards Fond du Lac, and then went on through simulated instrument flight, steep turns, slow flight, and power-on and power-off stalls.  K pointed out that I could actually shave 10mph off of my slow flight.  After the test, he also pointed out that I tried too hard to induce the stall by increasing the pitch instead of just setting the pitch and waiting for the speed to bleed off.  Next came a simulated engine failure, which I handled alright except for I didn’t simulate an emergency radio call and then my chosen field did not have a suitable field adjacent to it.  So a field with a backup next door and a backup on the other side would be safer, in case my glide distance was not enough or too much.

Finally, we executed an S-turn across a road, which K said I handled o.k., but only because I staggered through it, not because I anticipated the wind direction and bank angles, which was mostly true.  I tried, but just didn’t hit it right.  I think that I did fine with my ground reference maneuvers during solo flight and with T because I had more time to think about and plan the maneuver — maybe the pressure was lower — but K took me into it immediately after climbing out from the simulated engine failure and I only had one shot at it.  K said I should have that thought out in advance so I don’t have to think about it during the test.  In any case, I understood the principle of the thing and explained it when he asked.  And I’m not making excuses here, but I think my patterns were a lot better when we went back for touch-and-gos because I did anticipate the crab angles.  Now that I think of it though, I could apply that principle better by anticipating a steeper or shallower bank angle in the turns during my traffic patterns, depending on my relationship to the wind.

Short and soft-field takeoffs and landings on runway 22 went o.k., but K kept telling me, “you just completely ignore the crosswind!” and I didn’t understand what he meant because I landed on the center line (at least the second time).  Well, after those two landings, we transitioned to runway 27 for a real crosswind landing.  The crosswind component was 11, the biggest crosswind I have landed in to date.  My sideslip was pretty jerky, but the plane landed close to straight and close to the center line and then K really chewed me out and I realized why he had been saying I was ignoring the crosswind.  I had forgotten to deflect the ailerons into the wind after touchdown.

K pointed out afterward that most pilots think the approach is the critical part of the crosswind landing, but really it is the touchdown and rollout.  I do a fine job of deflecting the ailerons during taxi, so why should I forget after touchdown?  He said something that really made sense to me.  Unless there’s a dead calm, If I treat every landing like a crosswind landing, I will develop the habit of deflecting the ailerons every time.  In fact, that’s why I am so consistent with it during taxi; I do it no matter how light the wind is.  So I am going to go shoot a few on the simulator with that advice and deflect the ailerons on every landing henceforth.

Let’s go flying!

My last two lessons were in preparation for the flight test. T took me through a review of all of the maneuvers that were required for the flight test and made sure that I could perform them proficiently. We did stalls — power on and off — steep turns, S-turns across a road, turns about a point, short-field and soft-field landings and takeoffs, and a little bit of simulated instrument flight. We also spent some time talking about the flight testing procedure and about what I should expect things to be like after getting my private pilot’s license.  T encouraged me that he would not have approved me for the test if he didn’t think I were capable and a safe pilot.

During lesson 38, ZH and K rode along.  Again I spent most of this flight under the hood.  We flew up to Brennan Field where we executed a low approach and along the way there and back, practised several recoveries from unusual attitudes while under the hood.  ZH thought that was great fun, especially the time when we were nose low and fast.  K fell asleep within the first fifteen minutes of the flight, which is comforting, funny, and unusual.  I recovered fairly well from the unusual attitudes, but like a lot of things, I thought through the process too much and recovered too slow.  By the end though, I was just doing it without thinking it through first.  I’m also improving at some of the other things like asking for repeated instructions when necessary and adjusting the mixture whenever changing altitude.  We executed a soft-field landing at the end of the lesson and it went fairly well.  Initially, I didn’t get the throttle down quite low enough so I ate up a lot of runway, but the landing was soft and the nose was high.