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It feels good to be home now! I've actually been busy since my last update. I went to Ohio from the 13-15th to see people since I haven't been working a lot. I got in later than I wanted on Monday but no one could give me a ride earlier. Had dinner with my mom that night and later went to Jo's. I spent Tuesday out at the KSU airport. It was Kent's turn to host the regional flight competition. I hoped to help judge but they had enough already so I mostly just talked to people I hadn't seen in a while. It was great to see the planes and everyone since I spent just about every day from 2004 to 2007 at that airport it's kind of weird to be away from it now. Had dinner with Tim and my dad and then went to Tim's apartment to play some Quakewars. Tim (Alkali) and I are pretty good at Quakewars together, and it would be awesome if more people would play with us. We stick together, usually with me as an Engineer and Tim a medic. I sometimes change my class depending on the objective, but typically it's my job to complete the mission and tim's job to revive me when I get shot. I prefer offense and Tim likes defense, but we usually just play on the Strogg (Alien) side. We played for about 2 hours. In one mission we were on the human team and it was our job to construct a generator underground. It's a good map that requires teamwork by the GDF (humans) to get into the highly defended area. If people just rush in randomly you will get mowed down or set off a mine. The strogg side was putting up a strong fight and we were getting pissed off so I came up with a strategy. I waited for some teammates to run in before me to take the fire, then I jumped in onto the generator, setting off the mines and dying. Then tim jumps in behind me to revive me and we got the generator built. After that we were able to rush the map before they could get a solid defense up. I had a good airstrike at a critical time to finish the map too, but it was our classic revive strategy that won the map. I always wish more people would get the game before like Wolf:ET, some people are just too good. So I get home midday on the 15th and early on the 16th I get a call from Eagle crew scheduling! This is after 2 weeks of not working at all. They need someone to fly Saabs in LAX for 4 days and I'm the most junior guy who has the days open so they put me on a flight leaving two and a half hours later and all of a sudden I'm on the west coast. I hardly got any time during the week at home with Alison! But as long as I'm out there I might as well enjoy the scenery. Flying over $Texas is pretty boring as it's very flat. Cali was very pretty with the blue coast and mountains. There's a lot of people packed into a small area along the coast. The 6am flights they had me doing were okay too since it felt like 8am to me. Aside from being away from home, flying out of LAX was very fun, and I wish it didn't cost so much to live out there. But then I'd be even further away. Anyways here's some pics:  
 
  Minor change to the Friends page - no longer unlimited entries for one week, it's up to 4 entries for 2 weeks. Some people post a lot and take over the page and some don't post even once a month. Limiting it to one week had too many people at the bottom in purple. I want as few as possible to be in purple, so this is a compromise. Everyone should appear at least once on the page. Wed/Thurs/Fri I'll be working on spicing up the Links page. I've got some ideas and we'll see how it turns out. Oh yeah and KSU ended up winning the flight team competition! We ended Western Michigan's ~20 year streak and came in first this year. It's come such a long way from 04 when I and the rest of the team vowed to turn around our 19 year streak of not even making it to nationals. I feel very proud to have been a part of that and I'm glad to have made a difference in the education of all the team and my former students. I griped about it a lot when I was doing it, but looking back I am glad I was an instructor, a competitor, and a coach.
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I passed the checkride to become a multi-engine flight instructor today. It was a little bit difficult. I was asked to teach the fuel system on the Piper Seminole. I wasn't totally prepared for that but I came up with a decent lesson pretty much on the fly. We then did our flight. We needed to get up pretty high to about 5500 feet. The clouds were sitting at 5000 and pretty heavy so we were climbing in and out of them until we got to a good straightaway. It was very hot in the airplane... Thats what I remember the most. Anyways, I should be able to get quite a bit of multi engine time and get on with my flying career at American Eagle soon!
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Yesterday had me pretty bummed at work after dealing with a pissy student at 7:30am and arguing for 2 hours with another. Today the weather and visibilty were pretty low so my C3 student and I took the Cessna 172SP with the G1000 Glass Cockpit system up for some practice approaches. Today totally made up for yesterday! I just love flying in the clouds, the whole man over nature aspect. We were flying to Alliance and broke out under the clouds right on top of the airport!! It could not have been any more perfect of an approach! I don't have any pictures cause we were pretty busy up there. I love those garmin systems. The SP flights are my favorite. Tonight I am supposed to fly in the Seminole to finish my time for my Multi-Engine-Instructor Rating. I should be able to go, instrument or visual. I want to get my multi engine time up and get out to Dallas as soon as possible.
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Tonight was supposed to be a real quick flight down to KCAK for some landings so I could sign my student off to fly at night solo. After arguing for 15 minutes over whether or not dispatch would close before I got back, We finally got in the air. Jake, another flight instructor, was already in the air on the same lesson. Winds were very strong tonight, from the southwest at 60 knots at 3000 feet!
So we take off relatively normal and climb to 3000 feet while listening to the automated weather, no big deal. We make our initial call, So as we're flying to Akron, we're hearing poor Jake and his student trying to head east after finishing their landings and they're giving them a hard time, trying to fly them different headings and utterly confused at the notion that they would like to go somewhere other than kent state. Finally 117KS cancels radar services and just leaves and they start giving us headings (vectors) to space us behind some learjet where the real fun begins
The learjet is about 250 feet above the ground when we hear: So I'm thinking great, they're probably going to take this out on us..... So we're finished with our last landing, expecting to get a vector northbound, and nothing, so I have my student ask for one and the controller gets all pissy and makes us fly further south! "9783P, fly runway heading (190 or almost directly south) and you need to tell us on downwind before your last landing when you expect to depart the pattern" And my student wants to go off on this controller, and I'm telling him not to because it won't help and would just make us look bad. We told them 2 landings then depart northbound on our first call but they said we did it wrong, despite 4 years always doing it the same way! But oh well! So we finally get a vector northwest (310) and we fly for a while and we don't hear anybody which isn't so unusual this late at night but we're out of Akron airspace and almost getting into Cleveland so we're trying to call Akron to get free of their control just like Jake but nothing is happening. Finally I switch to radio #2 and we call and they're all like "we've been trying to call you for 10 minutes where were you?" so we explain we just switched the radios and the first one wasn't working, and sorry can we just go back to KSU. And then I hear "Is there an Instructor on board?" And my heart sinks down about 2 feet... "Yes.." Have him call this number...blah blah blah" so I copy it and I'm freaking out cause this only happens in bad situations and I was worried about us having a stuck microphone and they were hearing all the things we were saying. We called Kent Operations on the "bad" radio and it worked so I don't know what was happening.. Solar Flares or something. So we landed and I'm all pissed cause I don't know what's going to happen with ATC. But I called and they only wanted to know what happened (which I sorta knew I didn't do anything wrong but you never know). They said we drifted too close to the arrival end of the runway and interfered with a jet. They blamed it on the airplane's gyro drift (where the heading instrument gets off over time), but I bet the wind was just stronger than they thought which blew us closer and they were unable to tell us about it for unknown reason. They probably had to give me a phone number just to look like they were punishing me for not knowing how to fly even though it was some mechanical quirk.
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I think that to be a teacher, one of your inherent motivations should be the desire to teach. To search for the means and methods to instill new knowledge onto your students. I know everyone's heard the start of this rant before. But here's the twist. I am complaining about myself. I call myself a teacher in the strictest sense because I interact one on one with my students to teach them how to fly. I spent a few thousand for the knowledge and skill needed to become a flight instructor. But now that I am one, I find that any desire I had to teach people to fly has been eaten by the demoralizing bureaucracy and endless paperwork of a government institution. Disastrous Ohio weather also has its part to play. My students don't make any progress. They are pretty lazy, especially when I remember the effort I put in to flying when I was in their place. They don't study, they don't make an effort to fly when they can, and it comes down on me as the instructor when they do not do well. It's my reputation that they are risking as well as their own, and for that I have to find extra ways to supplement their learning. This equals more work for me, which as a general rule I am opposed to. Through all the pain and suffering I find myself asking where is the desire and devotion as a teacher that I am supposed to have? I think it disappeared when I went to Dallas and felt closer to my career then I do now. I feel that flight instruction is a step backwards although I was not even flying in Dallas. It's something that I do only to return to that which impressed me so. I hope that in the days to come I will find something that will return the joy of flight instruction to me. Or maybe it's just been a bad couple of days.
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