Plan "B"

"It's always Plan B" my lovely wife says. Well, unfortunately, for my flight training that has been the case, and this was no exception. I travelled to Philadelphia this past weekend with hopes of knocking out my 10 hours of complex time and squeezing in a checkride just before hitting the road, but Plan A unfolded almost as quickly as it was enacted. Upon arrival at the FBO Friday morning and meeting the instructor to whom I was assigned, I discovered that he was off on Sunday and they couldn't backfill him with another instructor. Which means that Sunday would be a lost day. Okay, we'll fly 5 hours today and 5 hours tomorrow. Not so fast, this instructor gets off at 3:30 every day. "Well, when would you do the night cross country?" you might ask. Maybe on Monday evening, was the proposed answer. Well I need to be at work on Tuesday, so that won't work. Perhaps next weekend? Perhaps, but I'd rather not. I'm already getting that feeling in the pit of my stomach, so decided to fly as much as possible on Friday and see where we got. When 3:30 rolled around, all of 2 hours is where we got, after spending most of the morning in ground school. I started to get the suspicion that ad-hoc, part 61 training just wasn't going to work for this 141 school, which is fine. Don't get me wrong, my goal is to pass the checkride, and pass it with much room to spare and learn along the way, but I have to balance all this with the fact that my time away from home is limited due to the whole day job thingy. We did get through all of the maneuvers, which was good as I hadn't been exposed to the commercial maneuvers before.

A quick side note: I typically don't nit-pick on my instructors, as they know far more than I, but I couldn't help but notice that during a steep turn demonstration my instructor dujour, while trying to gain altitude for some oddball reason, bled speed off to the point that the plane was buffeting at the edge of a stall. All this while in a 55 degree bank at about 2200' AGL. I wasn't really feeling that, so I discreetly pushed as hard as possible on the yoke with my index finger while saying something to the effect of "watch your airspeed". Something about stalling and spinning into the ground just didn't sit well with me, but I digress.

On Saturday, we managed to get in the day cross country, which was a beautiful severe-clear affair across the PA mountains to Williamsport. Not sure I need to get back there, but it is a gorgeous part of the country, with runway 9/27 nestled right at the base of a good-sized mountain (by eastern US standards, anyway). Upon return to the Philly area, we ran through the maneuvers, and then capped it off with a power off 180 - which I need power to land from - which netted us a whopping 4 hours of flight time, leaving me 60% of the way there, as the title implies After weighing my options, and looking at a Sunday replete of flying, and with a pesky customer issue looming at work, I decided to return to my home and punt.

And thus, Plan B is in effect, and will kick off with a night cross country to an as-yet-undecided location tomorrow evening. More to follow...