Well, yesterday was supposed to be a red-letter day for me; I had scheduled my first real lesson for the afternoon. Time to stop poking around and do something structured. Alas, but I got my first experience with the weather changing plans. Tropical storm Ida made landfall overnight Monday night, and all day Tuesday was rain, rain, and more rain. But as of Tuesday evening, the forecast for Wednesday was looking somewhat optimistic. Unfortunately, when I got up Wednesday morning, it was still raining. Still, the forecast indicated that the rain would end early in the day. I held out hope.
Once I got to work, I decided to be proactive and figure out aviation weather. Accordingly, I found the METAR/TAF info for both PDK and LZU. I had previously read some of the rules for deciphering these rather arcane bits of text, but I needed a refresher. Wikipedia came through, and before long, I was keeping close tabs on the cloud state. Early in the day, the clouds were low, generally broken at 500 feet and overcast at about 1500 or so. But as the day wore on, the ceiling kept getting better. By the time I was ready to leave for PDK, the overcast layer was up to nearly 4000′.
As soon as I got outside, though, my hopes fell. It was drizzling a bit, and continued to do so as I drove to PDK. On arrival, Scott confirmed that we wouldn’t be flying, so we elected to do a ground lesson instead. I spent the next hour mostly reviewing things I knew or at least had some familiarity with: aircraft construction, nomenclature, principles of lift, flight controls, etc. While I didn’t really learn anything revolutionary, I was able to connect some dots that I hadn’t known before, so overall, it was a beneficial bit of time.
I also picked up my student pilot kit. Among other things, this kit contained my logbook, in which Scott promptly entered the time we’d spent on my discovery flight. So even though I didn’t fly, it was still meaningful to get my first logbook entry. I’ve spent the last day reading through my private pilot guide from the kit… already working on stuffing my head.
Tomorrow morning, we’ll try it again. Weather looks good, so we should be able to get in an hour or so before I have to go to work.
