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I am writing this later than I should have.
Yesterday, at 11:11am my friend Nikki Kukwa passed away from leukemia. She was getting better for a while, but it eventually overtook her. She was a good person, and a great member of the flight team. She was the best at the Safety interview and won the award for us twice. One of the things I remember most is during the 2004 flight team regionals at KSU she sang the national anthem and messed it up! She stopped and I know she was embarrased, but she started again and did it perfectly. I'm not going to say it wasn't funny, but now that you think about it, she could have run away right there.
If you get the chance to do something extraordinary today, maybe something you wouldn't normally do, please do it for her and remember that you can always start again.
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In a very hot and exhausting day yesterday, I passed my flight instructor checkride. The weather in the morning was super shitty. Would have been an awesome day to fly in the clouds, but I needed to fly in the morning with my instructor before we left, and we couldn't even get high enough to fly the traffic pattern. The checkride was scheduled for 11:30 am, and he pushed it back to Noon but said noon was the latest we could get started. Another guy I know named Brian Marsh was scheduled with me. Finally it started breaking up a little and I was able to fly with Nathan in the pattern for 2 landings. He signed my logbook and Marsh and I sped off to Medina airport at full throttle at a fairly low, yet not illegal altitude.
The examiner was his usual self; it's fairly easy to talk to him but you better not relax or say anything that he'll have you elaborate on. Marsh flew first as the weather barely cleared up to acceptable. His ride was fairly short. He passed, which is good. So up I go and we do about 7 or 8 takeoffs and landings. Luckily, I had some fairly good landings, even my emergency (he pulls the throttle to simulate failure and you have to land). He always likes to do it in a spot where you'll have to make a choice and I went for the right runway. That's good because I should be able to do it anyways though. After about 50 min of just traffic pattern work we finally went out for the maneuvers. Two steep turns, min. controllable airspeed, a departure stall, a lazy eight and two chandelles. My first chandelle was a little weak from not having done one in about 3 months, so he made me do it again. My second one was better. He finally said take me back to the airport so I did, expecting him to pull some sort of emergency again but he didn't, only said to make the last landing a good one, which turned out okay. It was so damn hot in that airplane. Oh well it's over and I'm a Certified Flight Instructor! Fear in the hearts of children!
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woohoo just failed my CFI checkride. Got through the 5 hour oral exam with not much problem. The weather was god awful today so I was just going to do the landings and discontinue the ride so I could do the higher altitude maneuvers another day. Ended up busting on the emergency landing because I forgot to check the fuel selector. So not too pleased with myself but then again almost no one passes their first time and even on the second time you dont see a lot.
Got to go to the bank and do some stuff then spend the rest of the weekend with Alison so yay.
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Today was a fun day. I was supposed to go to the airport at 10:30 to meet Prof. Weber and do my tryout for the IFR Simulator event for flight team. When I got there, I found out he and Mr. Palcho were supposed to take the brand new Piper Seminole, N31246 out for a spin to work on the flight training checklist. I said half-jokingly that he could make it up to me by letting me ride backseat. He brought it up to Tim and he said yes! Awesome! It was a pretty quick flight out to Port Meadville (About 60nm away, just north of Y-Town) and back. The new plane's pretty cool, with a nice dual Garmin 430 GPS system and the fact that the engines actually start on it. They also said that once my instructor gets checked out in it (tomorrow) I can take it to fly off the last 2.8 hours I had left over from my multi class! Totally can't wait, I'll probably take it out to Rochester NY or something.
When I got home I was playing around with google and looking up the flight team website with it. Somehow ended up on Wikipedia and found some vandalism on the Entries for Kent State and the Kent State Shootings. This kinda hurt deep down that someone would take a tragic event like that and smear "So-and-so is very gay" all over it. Did my civic duty and reverted it back to before their edits. Made me mad a little. Otherwise I'm at work now and about to go to the airport to torture AK-47 with a tough NDB approach, hold, and localizer approach at CCR airport in California. Then it's E6-B tryout time at 7:30pm-9 and finally get to go home and study for a test in Flight Instructor Theory at 7:30am tomorrow.
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April 7th was a very busy day. Got up at 6am. Plan was to leave the house at 7, get to Hopkins Airport at 8 and the plane left at 9. Well it took a little longer to get ready than we thought and Alison's puppy decided to take a giant dump in the car, so we got leaving around 7:25. So we're hauling it up 77 and I-80 during rush hour hoping I don't smell like it for the rest of the day and make it to CLE around 8:10. No big deal, right? 50 min right?
Well the airport is busier than I've ever seen it so I go to the self-checkin and it says my boarding time is 8:25am! Shiot! Run to security which of course has a long line. God bless the TSA. So I'm running to the gate with my shoelaces still untied and I notice my ticket is gone! Totally dropped it in the hallway! Go running back the other way without tied shoes. Luckilly I found my ticket (no one was kind enough to pick it up and take it to some random food place, thinking they were helpful) and got to the gate right as they started boarding. Two other KSU students, Eric and Mark, were on the same flight. We said hellos and boarded the 737 to Houston. We got there around 10:30am local time, with the interview starting at 2:00. We talked about interview stuff untill 2, managing to find our way to the Expressjet Simulator Building. This was different than the American interviews, they had everyone come into the same room were they answered some questions and talked about the different kinds of internships. They wanted to talk to the KSU students first, so they called us up one by one. I was third and once again had a whopping 10-15min interview. I thought it was way too short! I didn't get to sell myself completely. Everyone else agreed too. There was nothing more to do at Expressjet so we went back to the airport (IAH). Got some food and talked about how short it was. Our plane left at 7:00pm local so we were there for like 3.5 hours. Plane got in CLE around 10:35pm our time. The approach was kinda cool. CLE weather was 2.5mi visibilty and clouds overcast at 600 feet. Broke out of the clouds right at the airport. The stuff pilots live for. All in all an exhausting day and I hope to hear good things from Expressjet in the next week or so.
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