Ok, so I managed to stay up till 7 watching some Queen music videos, Star Wars movies, and surfing the net till my butt fell asleep. That's about when the rest of me fell asleep. I woke up around nine (flopped off the couch), scrounged up some breakfast (called my dad on his cell and made him bring me a breakfast sandwich from Frischs), then cleaned myself up for flying lessons (showered, brushed my teeth, ect.)
Now that I'm a pilot (at least in training), I'm a weather nazi, and I've been watching this massive storm system hovering over Indiana for a few days. All of the sudden, this morning, in half an hour, it cruises our way (ah, so the weathermen do have an idea of what they're predicting.....). So I figured we'd stay on the ground and hit the books instead of flying.
Wrong! My instructor told me we were "flying the pattern," which, for all you non-pilots out there (yes, I did mean to sound condescending saying that.........I get a kick out of it) means that we fly a big rectangle around the runway and practice landings and takeoffs. This means we don't need fantasic weather like we do for manuvers, and we can land if the weather gets too bad. So we end up flying the pattern in the rain (he called it mild, but the way the freaking plane was turbulating [the word for being affected by turbulence???], I'd call it something else.......) and I made 6 out of 8 landings (how can you not land and stil be alive you ask? It's called a go-around, or an aborted takeoff [:::abort:::]), which works out to 75%. Yeah, I can see Delta gettting away with that one. To be fair, I've only done 10 landings total, and there was rain/turbulence, but I'm gonna ace those landings soon, lemme tell ya.
One of the things that pilots like to brag about (to each other, not you bumbling, land-dwelling idiots [jk]) is how short they can land on the runway......decent is about the first third or so, a really good one is the first quarter, and an excellent landing takes place in the first 100 feet or so. I managed, on one of my landings, to land in the first 20. My instructor said he'd never landed that close......I think I felt my tires on the grass just before the runway. I didn't mean to, and it was an accident, because we were sinking too fast for our rate of glide, but what the heck, I'll take it! (Hey, you try landing 1700 lbs. at 70 miles an hour at a descent of 500 feet a minute- yeah, that's what I thought).
Now I have to go to work. Nothing like going from soaring at 1800 feet and practicing landings to washing some dishes........:::sigh:::