Early start

It has been another sunny and good day. It was an early start again with me cycling at 6:30 am in the semi dark and it was quite cold. I had to keep putting one hand at a time into my pocket. The first lesson today was in perfect flying conditions with little wind, the sun out, clear blue sky and not much other air traffic. So we did circuits in N945AC with lots of touch and goes. Nikki was doing the RT so I could concentrate on flying. During this hour my flying really improved and at the end of it I taxied back with a smile on my face. My next lesson was put back to 3pm so I had some time to spare. I got a copy of my account from Richard and struggled to make sense of the figures. There were also entries descibed as "Payment, Miscellaneous" I went through the bill with Richard and found that the per hour rate for a Cessna 152 is :-
C152 hire $85, Instruction $40, Fuel surcharge (first I knew of it) $7, Damage waiver $3. So the rate is $135 per hour. When I first booked back in August the rate without the damage waiver was $114 per hour so be prepared for increased charges.
Even with the new figures one item on the bill was $185 for 1 hour of flying. It turns out that the instuctor rate for Nikki is $75 per hour and then Richard adjust this for course students to $40 per hour. In this case either it had been forgotten or there can not been enough time elapsed for the adjustment to be made. The miscellaneous item turned out to be the bike hire consisting of two charges - $100 deposit and $25 fee (per month). The account does not show my initial $500 deposit paid back in the Autumn so I need to remember about this. Another item said "parts, parts, parts" and I assume that this meant the C152 POH, the Airport directory, and the Navigation logs that I needed and these totalled $60.26.
So the bills are difficult to check and as a result I need to request one every few days.
I decided to cycle back to the hotel. There must be a lot of money in the area because down most roads on my route there are lovely houses and all the back gardens face onto a kind of river street so they all have their boats moored at the back of the house. Back at the hotel I put my shorts and a t shirt on and went by the pool area for an hour and wrote some notes and read through some flying manuals.
Here are a couple of pics of my hotel room.


Having been here a few days now I find it suits me well although the walls must be v. thin as you can almost everything going on in next door rooms.
Then I decided to get back on the bike again (my bum is bruised by now) and cycle to a general store and stock up on items for doing my own food. This will save money and be quicker. I bought rolls, spread ham, cheese, apples, fresh orange juice, a microwave meal and six lagers. I just manged to get everything thing bar the rolls into my rucksack. Back at the hotel I made a couple of rolls and had fruit juice to drink and a pink lady apple after. I seem to be eating a lot because after all these cycling trips I start feeling hungry. If I can get the balance right I should loose some weight. At 2:15 I cycled back to the airport. The wind was quite gusty and not suitable for circuits so we were off to do stalls and their recovery in N946AC. The view out of the cockpit window was fantastic again as we flew south along the coast. We did the stall work and then started heading back north. The wind was strong and we were making slow progress. When we got to the point 10 miles south of the airport, I changed the radio to the tower frequency and they were under pressure with jets flying in from all over the place. Apparently it is Presidents day soon ?. Anyway it was quite exciting because we had to take an unusual approach to the field. My instructor took over the radio calls as it was hectic. I flew the plane under her instruction. Basically because we were fitting in our landing between two jets we had to drop out of the sky fast with full flap and power on idle and turn onto the runway very late (Nikki did this bit). I took control again and my landing was a bit bumpy but OK. It took a while to get clearance back to the air school parking area but eventually got there. It had been an exciting lesson and was much, much busier than you would get at Blackbushe. Then back on the bike again to return to the hotel in still good sunny weather. I did a microwave meal for myself. Luckily I have a 9am lesson in the morning so not rushing so much. I've still got to do my blog.

Cheers Phil