slowly to Rapid City

Friday night my soon to be official flight instructor asked if I wanted to go on a cross country trip to Rapid City South Dakota on Saturday night. Um, YEAH.

It was part of his solo check list he has to do to get his commercial license. I tagged along so he could practice also being an instructor. Our initial flight plan was to leave Denver at 630 pm, fly to Cheyenne, land and take off, fly to Rapid City, land and take off, and then fly back to Denver, which would have gotten us back to Denver at 3 am (the plane we were in manages about 105 MPH).

My instructor's instructor (luckily) suggested we crash in Rapid City Saturday night and fly back early Sunday. I never realized this but when you rent a plane you only pay for the hours you fly so you can keep the plane out for a day or two and it isn't that expensive.

We got to McAir around 4 pm on Saturday. After some socializing with the staff there we went out to check the plane. It was around 430 and the temperature had started dropping and the wind was picking up.

I was surprised how tiny the cockpit was in the plane. It was smaller than even my Toyota MR2. I learned how to do the outside airplane check, how to undo the chains that hold the plane on the runway (not so easy to do when it's cold and windy), how to check the fuel (you have to drain it from 13 different spots on the airplane and then you have to climb up on the wing and put the fuel back), and how to do the cockpit pre-check. And how to navigate a runway that has patches of ice (not so fun with those little airplane tires).

The flight from Denver to Cheyenne was really turbulent. But fun. Like being on a roller coaster. The wind was really strong so we were getting bumped around a lot. Visibility was pretty good. The plane was freezing. The heat knob thing for the cockpit wouldn't pull out. By the time we landed in Rapid City the cuffs of my jeans, which I had gotten wet on the runway doing the pre-flight check, were frozen solid.

west jet lobby in Rapid city...

glad it was nice because we waited almost an hour for the airport shuttle - we got to the hotel at 11 pm and had to get up at 5 to be back at the airport for takeoff - yes, I'm doing this for fun

Weirdly I could hear radio traffic but could not hear my instructor as he was responding to the various towers we communicated with. I hope my head set isn't fucked. I was supposed to do radio calls this morning but begged off since I wasn't sure what to say. My instructor, who does a very accurate impression of Borat, tried to teach me the radio calls when we had a few down minutes. I think I will learn a lot if he continues to say things in a Borat accent.

Yesterday was a confusion of gauges, weather shit, weird calculations for flight plans, and basically I was just grateful I got my seat belt buckled correctly and the door closed properly. Today I was able to read the gauges and sort of understand the instructions from the tower.

We took off in a very strong headwind (I stayed in the plane while my instructor did the pre-flight outside check - it was fucking cold and the plane was shaking as if it were flying). Then we got into a layer of fog (had we planned to take off at our originally scheduled departure we definitely would have been delayed) and flew in that, off instruments because there was no visibility, for 30 minutes. It was pretty fun. I took some pics of the fog and of Denver as we approached...

south dakota hinterlands, lots of snow, not much else

approaching the front range

Denver off the nose - those weird black blurs are the propeller

Anyway, over the holidays I'm hitting the books for ground school and will hopefully get in a few more flights this winter to prep me for when I start my private pilot's license in the spring.