Monthly Archive September, 2007

Night Flight and the surprise landing at PDX International

The night flight was awesome!
Made my flight plans and reached the airport at 7.30 pm. Tom was already there. Plan was to do 10 stop and gos and a total of 3 hour in-flight time to meet the license requirements.
I filed the flight plan, did the pre-flight checks with a red flash light. That takes […]

Night Flying today

Yay! So it is that day when the forecast for night flying is good and Tom is available too.
I am really excited, so is Pooja.
Plan is to fly from Hillsboro Airport to Aurora (KUAO), fly over it and catch I-5 South and follow that till Salem and then cut across to Corvallis (CVO). And then […]

100 Landings and the Garmin G1000 Glass Cockpit

Was doing some numbers in my logbook and realized I had just completed my first 100 landings. And what an airplane to do it in.
Last month I decided to get an extra endorsement for the Cessna 172SP with the latest G1000 glass cockpit. This is the latest in aviation cockpit systems technology. The airplane has […]

FAA Knowledge Test and Dreams about the future

My FAA knowledge test finally happened, but not without some effort.
Studied like crazy, gave lots of sample tests (scores 85% - 94%) and was trying to push towards 95% or more. This is probably the first time in my life that I was trying to push scores rather than just trying to pass (70% required […]

The job of an Air Traffic Controller

After having flown airplanes for the past year, I have immense respect for the air traffic controllers. It is regarded as the world’s most stressful job and you know why when you fly in the system, listening to all the ATC chatter.
As with a lot of other pilots, I enjoy listening to the ATC conversation, […]