Wings

Hello People!

Well it's nearly Christmas! My my... Doesn't time fly when you're having fun??

I was going to write Happy Holidays just to annoy the right-wing Christian Extremists we have here in Texas, but I wouldn't imagine any of them will read this in any case. Apparantly "Happy Holidays" is meant to include all of those people who celebrate other holidays at this time (like the festival of shopping for example), and using something other than Christmas somehow makes the occaision less 'holy'

For the record, Wikipedia says:

The word holiday has related but different meanings in English-speaking countries. Based on the Old English words holy and day (halig dæg), holidays originally represented special religious days. The word has evolved in general usage to mean any special day.

So there. Happy Holidays to all!

It was 2 years ago that I first got my Private Pilot Certificate, so it was time for my bi-annual flight review. This involves either an hour of ground school followed by an hour of maneuvres to check that you've not forgotton anything, ot can be done via attendance at an Air Safety Seminar plus 3 separate hours of instruction covering Instrument flying, landings, and maneuvres. I took the latter route, therefore earning me my first phase of WINGS, and giving me some more face time with an instructor which is always useful.

I have downloaded my flight logs from the GPS, and you can see the two local flights here in one Google Earth KML file. The first flight took us over to Willams Airport for some landing practice, and then back to Hooks for some more landings. The second flight took us west from Hooks to the 'practice area' where we did stalls, slow flight and steep turns. Hey kids - see if you can see where I did my stalls and steep turns (360 deg) in the track logs...

Anyway, all was successfully achieved, and now I'm planning my next long flight which will be in a Boeing 777 back to Manchester via Chicago and Heathrow. To be honest, I'm leaving most of the details to British Airways...

posted by Sam @ 23:23