Its been a good long while.

Its been a good long while since I last updated the blog, but its been a good long while since I've been flying for one reason and another until a couple of weeks ago. Since my last flight the flying school moved sites as Sheffield City Airport had closed. They are now located at Doncaster Robin Hood and Sandtoft.

I visited the office at Doncaster and what a pain it is to get to and also getting to the planes so I've decided that I will fly from Sandtoft as a consequence, Doncaster will have its uses, especially when winter sets in as I can do night flying from there as they are open 24x7.

I took the firefly up a couple of weeks ago and was a little nervous as it had been sometime, plus I had a passenger so if things had gone badly it wouldn't just be me in danger. They are a good friend and I wanted everything to be right, we'd tried to go flying on another day, but it had lashed down. We arrived at the Sandtoft in the early evening and went flying, it was a little hazy, but everything seemed to be going well. Taking off went fine, so did the actual flying. We were up for just over an hour, when I rejoined Sandtoft I started to get nervous, very nervous as I had alwasys hated landing at Sandtoft for whatever silly reason, but it was a perfect touch down.

I've promised them that next time we will head off somewhere and see something, now that I have my PPL I feel that I should actually do something with my flying instead of just flying in circles.

About a week ago I had another free evening so booked a plane and took a guy called Phil up, in a PA28 Warrior. We was very excited, quite funny really as I kind of take it for granted now, just being able to turn up, rent a plane and head off somewhere with it. He seemed quite nervous as well, talking to him I think it was the fear of the unknown as he has been in a Cessna before now.

I took it easy and decided that it would be worth just spending sometime taking it easy and showing him that we are not going to drop out the sky if the engine stops, show him that if we stall then we don't drop out the sky so we headed up to Trent Falls, which isn't that far from Sandtoft, where its nice and flat and you're not likely to hit anything. I took the plane upto 3,000 and throttled the engine back and performed a glide descent, down to about 1,000. Phil was a little worried when I first throttled back the engine, but he soon settled down once he realised that we were not going to die he settled down.

We were up for about 50 mins as the weather started to close in and it started looking very dark over by Sandtoft so we headed back and had a near perfect landing, I was a little low at one stage, but recovered without issue.

I think next time I go flying I'm going to do a couple of hours of circuits as Sandtoft to get back into the swing of things. I've got some lieu time owning so hopefully should be able to get that done in the next couple of weeks.

Night rating.

Its been a while since my last post, nearly six weeks to be exact and since then a lot has happened, the obvious one is Christmas and New Year so I hope everyone had a good one.

During November and December I managed to get my night flying rating done. The first couple of lessons involve getting over the wow factor, night flying is stunning, absolutely amazing. The real problems are height perception, interestingly once you are above 500' you could be at any height.

I sent my license off before christmas and it arrived this week while I was at work so I popped out at lunch today to pick it up. I couldn't see anything that mentioned night flying so rang the CAA.

Confused the poor guy on the phone as he normally deals with the engineering licenses. He asked around the office and it is a single sentance added the part 9 of the license. I felt a right berk, but also had a sense of pride when I read "The privileges of this license may be exercised at night"

Hopefully if/when the weather picks up I can get some more flying, I desperately want to go somewhere new and get some cicuits done and also just go somewhere.