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.
Thanks
A few weeks ago I made the front page of the Kent Stater, so it’s official. I can graduate now.
That’s all for today
My internship with American Airlines is over.
The flight team regional competition is over.
What the hell am I going to do with myself? I have free time again!
It’s been so long that I don’t even know what to do with myself at this point.
Since it appears like it will take a while before my actual webserver goes back up, I am going to attempt to use this livejournal thing since most of my friends are on here anyways.
So what’s been going on with me? I know it’s been a while since I’ve had any time to hang out.
Internship ended halfway through August. Most of you know that. It was an amazing experience and has left me with way too much desire to get into my career with the airlines. So much that I am now working hard to get my flight time in so I have the expirience to get hired. This means I have about one more semester in Ohio. Once I get hired, I will be given a city as my base city and I’ll have to move there. So like Will I will be torn away eventually. So, we’ve got to LAN party like we’ve never LAN partied before! Or something.
Once I got home from $Texas, I started work as a flight instructor at Kent State. I have two classes this semester, Crew Resource Management (easy), and Computer Literacy (makes me cry so easy). Computer Literacy is a little bit of work since my teacher is a retard and asks weird questions. I also still work at Resnet. Actually, I am taking computer literacy because I needed 6 credits to work at resnet. Any time that was not taken up by flight instructing, class, and resnet went to flight team. I probably practiced an average of 4 hours per day for flight team, and coached both Computer Accuracy and Simulator events. The competition was the week before last, and we got third place in the most competitive region and won a spot to nationals. I won 4th at Navigation, 8th at power off landings, 7th at power on landings and 6th at simulator. Awesome! I will graduate before nationals, so this was my last competition. I promised to stick around and help coach cause they are my friends and I can’t abandon them.
What news has happened in the last, oh 3 months, since jo took down my site?
I got a 15.4” macbook pro, 2GHz Core duo and 2 GB of ram. It’s pretty awesome. Runs windows except for the built in speakers don’t work (headphones port works fine). Excellent frames on q3 and fs2004. Still trying to sell my 12 powerbook, will go on ebay soon.
Also, I need a place to live, so anyone looking for a place until May, tell me.
I guess that’s all for now, not bad for my re-entry to blogworld.
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!
