My First Solo

I have a new decoration for my office wall:

As I promised in my last entry, I flew the airplane solo! Last Friday we had a temporary break in the cloudy weather, so I rushed down to the airport on my lunch break (about a 15 minute drive). First I went up with my instructor, executed two unassisted landings and taxiied back to the ramp. Then my instructor got out of the plane, wished me good luck, and I was on my own. I taxiied the airplane back to the runway and let the tower know that I was a student pilot doing my first solo. As soon as I was cleared, I took off!

I was far too focused to be very excited at this point. All that was in my head were the things I needed to do: keep the wings level, fly runway heading and climb at 80MPH. At the end of the runway, turn left and overfly the golf course for noise abatement.

I'm so used to having an instructor in the right seat that as soon as I leveled off at the pattern altitude and had a moment to take a breath, the quiet in the cockpit got to me and I actually felt a bit lonely.

That passed very quickly and was replaced by, holy cow, this is not Microsoft Flight Simulator. I am flying an actual freaking airplane in the actual sky (really!), which was quite clear and beautiful that day.

As soon as I reached a point towards the end of my downwind leg, tower cleared me to land and I began my descent. Now I was back to being extremely focused: flaps, speed at 85, descend at 500 fpm, glide, break the glide, flare, touchdown.

Back to the ramp. I marked my logbook: 0.7 hours dual instruction, 0.3 hours solo. I returned to work that afternoon with a huge grin on my face.