Marc's Public Blog - Flying

Current Music: Top Gear - 06x03
Current Mood: Good

When I landed in France and was driving back from Charles De Gaules to my Dad's we had somewhat worse traffic than usual (it sucks regardless), and I found out that it was because of the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget which happened to bethat week.
The best part was that the next day (Friday) was going to be opened to the public. So I got there bright and early around 09:40 (getting there was "interesting", so I ended up getting a cab that took the back roads and left me from some walking distance from the back entrance, but got me there in reasonable time). By then, the line to get in was already longer than 1h, swell....
Due to a small queueing misunderstanding, I got in a bit early :) and proceeded to see as much as I could before the air show started. The Airbus A380 (two decker, 800 people) was the show's star and the crowd favourite. I also got to see its first flight in front of spectators :)
As for the other planes and displays, it was quite nice to see other things than US planes, from Mirages, Rafales, Eurocopters (including one doing a backflip in the air, impressive)































There are lots more pictures, including a visit of the very nice Air Museum all here

This was really time well spent, I had never been to that Salon or the Museum and I don't regret having done so. The only thing was the mad crowds, but turns out that it was actually a piece of cake compared to people who went on Saturday and Sunday (more than half a million total)

Current Music: Rising Stars - April 2005 - DJ Chilli
Current Mood: Just tired.

So, after much work to try and find a CFI at the last minute to do my check ride this morning, I got scheduled for my check ride flight this morning.
It turned out to be harder than was I was hoping for, mostly because I had a bad night and showed up fairly non awake.
I was first quizzed on procedures and knowledge, and did fairly well there. For my flight, I did well enough, except steep turns, and I came out too early on a no engine landing (although I did land the plane anyway, but a bit too far on the runway due to my resulting speed on approach).
Outside of that, the check ride went well and the instructor said he was happy with my performance (I wasn't though, since I knew how to do the two things I screwed up, and was annoyed at struggling due to a bad night).
Oh well... Anyway, that's behind me for now, and I'll worry about the rest when I come back from Europe in July

Something weird happened the last two days: in total defiance of state regulations, we actually got rain after May. In June actually... WTF?

Anyway, that was good, it gave for a very sketchy day and very low clouds, rendering VFR flight impossible (1000 feet cloud base is required, and we had 800 with the first layers at 500 feet).
We got a special VFR clearance, which can be given to only one plane, and it was me since I was the first one. This allowed me to go practise and fly without instruments while being the only one in the pattern.
It was quite interesting as we got to fly very low (300 feet or so), and do a pattern from a pretty low altitude. At that point, I actually had to worry how close I was to the ground, power lines, and other fun stuff like that.
The weather gradually got better over the following hour until the field went VFR again soon before I came back in.
The other fun part was that the plane looked it had a bad oil leak, but turns out that it was actually graphite coming out of the engine. As a result, I had an aborted takeoff since another pilot reported me on runup, thinking that I had a bad engine leak. Another good practice for that day.