It All Starts Somewhere

After about nine months of preparing to begin flight training, this weekend I finally got started! I had been trying to decide whether to go for my Private Pilot Certificate (PPC) or my Sport Pilot Certificate (SPC). On a vacation last week to Cabo San Lucas, I forced myself to weigh the options and make a choice. The decision, as you probably guessed from this blog's title, was to go with the SPC.

Once that decision was made, there was no reason to delay the training any longer. I scheduled a first lesson with CFI (Certified Flight Instuctor) Eric Jacobson of The Flight School of Gwinnett, the only school in the area offering Sport Pilot training. I had not been to the school before, but I had taken a ride with Eric before. I was a little nervous as most folks are in an unfamiliar situation, but I was excited to be working on my lifelong dream of being a pilot.

The airplane I'll be flying for my training is an AMD Zodiac CH601XL, which is a two seat, low wing LSA (Light Sport Aircraft). It uses a 100 horsepower Continental engine, and cruises at about 110 knots (127mph) at 75% power. I was surprised at how well-equipped and modern the school's Zodiac (FAA registration N130AW) is. It has a "glass" instrument panel, using two Dynon LCD displays instead of traditional dial instruments, a Garmin 496 moving map GPS with weather and air traffic reporting (through the Garmin GTX330 transponder), and a two axis autopilot with altitude hold. That's much better equipped than most tired old trainers.

So how was the actual flying? Cold! The Zodiac is a drafty plane, with vents that don't seal completely and a very marginal cabin heater. It was below zero on the ground, and only got colder as we went higher. We could see our breath the entire time, and by the time we landed my face and hands were numb!

Other than the temperature, the flying was great. Eric let me taxi and take off, and we climbed to about 4500 feet and then did some turns. I kept most of the turns shallow, around 15-20 degrees. I didn't have a lot of trouble holding altitude, but I found that holding a heading, or rolling out on a heading from a turn, was much harder. The Zodiac has such sensitive controls, that it's just too easy to wander off the desired heading. I do think it's much easier to hold a heading by picking ground references to head to, rather than trying to "chase" the heading around on the instruments, so that's now my official technique (and the correct one, based on Eric's and other pilots' comments to me).

After we landed we had a short debrief session so that Eric could tell me what I did right and wrong, and we could talk about the next lesson. I left the flight school very satisfied and excited to have the next lesson. Since the following Monday was MLK Day and I had the day off, I decided to fly again two days later...