Enjoying Flying

Next up is my FAA written test. I finished up my solo cross-country work last week, and have just been studying for the upcoming tests and getting ready for my checkride. As it stands right now, I've used a little less than 30 of my 50 AF funded hours of private flying time so I'll be taking some more cross-countries to burn up some time. All of those 30 hours haven't been used for instruction or cross-country work...I've taken the plane up a few times just to fly around on a nice day. Since I have about 20 hours left, I'll hopefully head down to Pensacola to see my buddy Matt Chapman and possibly to Dolphin Island southwest of Mobile, AL.

One of those days of flying just for fun was today. A friend of mine here at the base needed to take a solo cross-country, so I figured I'd tag along in my own plane. We went to two other airports besides the one we took off from (I left from the Golden Triangle Regional Airport (GTR) in the pic above, and he left from an airport about 15 miles east of me), and planned to stop at the second one for lunch. He flew over to GTR about 9:30 this morning and we were off. It was pretty uneventful on the first leg, but we had some fun along the way. We each arranged before takeoff to tune into 123.45 (no one uses that frequency around here) on the radios so we could talk back and forth and keep updated where the other guy was.

Once we reached the second airport on our route, it was time for lunch. They have a courtesy car at the airport for people coming into town to use for up to 2 hours. We called ahead to make sure they had a car, so we were thinking like a typical rental type car...but no. We got the Oldsmobile hoopy from the hanger. We hit a place called Jake & Rip's for some good eatin'!


Well, it was a good time...but all good things have to come to an end. The both of us will be finished with the private pilot training soon, and they've been saying that those who have SUPT class dates months down the road (like us...Jan 8th) will most likely get bumped ahead. So, that means we'll probably get moved into the November class. I'm cool with that, and it'll still give me some time to work on some T-37 stuff before I get started. That's it for now.