What a beautiful sunrise. It is darn cold but the sky is cloudless and a whole range of blue and orange shades are announcing the start of a new day at Naples airfield. It is 7am and I have just ridden from the hotel passing a frost on all the green areas. My fingers and ears were still cold from the ride. I had worn some bike gloves, but getting ones where your fingers are exposed suddenly seemed like a bad idea. Anyway I walked out onto the apron (sorry ramp) with my camera to take a photo of the sunrise over all the various aircraft parked there. My camera showed a icon that was a funny red box with a line through it. I wondered what it meant and then remembered that I had plugged the memory card into my laptop and not removed it. So my chance to take a fantastic scenic panorama shot was lost. Even worse was the fact that when I did the pre-flight checks on the aircraft it had ice on it. I went to the front desk at NAC to report this. Nikki said that she had never seen aircraft icing in the 9 years she had been there. The sun was coming up slowly and some people were turning their aircraft around so that the sun could melt previously shaded areas. At 8am my aircraft was still icy and the decision was made to delay the lesson until 11am. Those students with 9am lessons booked were OK because the ice was gone by then and so was my instructor with another student. I watched a video on emergency procedures in flight and another on Weight and Balance, the whizz wheel, navigation and VOR. The temperatures were now 10/8 whereas they were 01/-1 at 7am so I checked over N946AC again (it had been refuelled). At 11am we started up and taxied down to runway 05. Touch and go's was the order of the day and my first landing was perfect, others were good to, but it started getting busy and we were having to extend the circuit or do orbits, etc. This meant that on some approaches the I was quite high and the necessary high sink rate to correct meant that my momentum was lost somewhat at the runway threshold making a smooth landing much harder. I did one flapless landing and a few more normal landings. The workload is high in the circuit and after an hour it was time to make a full stop landing, then taxi back to the ramp. The de-brief showed that I was making progress but some aspects still need improvement. It was 12:45 and my next lesson was at 3pm. I walked to a cafe that was just outside the airport and about half a mile away. I ordered 'hot pastrami on rye' mainly because this is what the original Kojak used to have in the tv cop series. I thought I would see what the real US version is like although this is not exactly New York. Whilst sipping my diet Pepsi and waiting for my order, someone I recognised from NAC came in and we started chatting. His name is Torsten and he is from Denmark. In fact there a lot of Danish students at NAC at the moment. He was doing the same course as me except flying a Cessna 172. We had an interesting chat about how things were going and what we thought about the school and it's instruction. I enjoyed my Kojak sandwich and after the meal we both went back to the flight school. Torsten was having to take the CAA written exams as for some reason the exams he had sat and passed in Denmark had not been accepted. He was taking the Navigation exam this afternoon. I checked over N964AC for the third time that day having got the weather details. It was now 16 degrees C. At 3:30 we taxied the short way to the new active runway (23). The wind had just swung around to the North West. It was the first time I had been in the circuit from this runway and new turning points had to be learnt. I cannot remember exactly how many circuits we did and if they included flapless landings, but near the end of the lesson I did bounce off the runway quite hard and so Nikki gave me a break and showed me how the circuit should be flown. My next and last circuit of the lesson was good and so was my landing. Back at the school my good, and need to improve areas we discussed. Torsten had passed his navigation exam. In the morning (9am start, yippee, I have an extra hour in bed) I will start with a couple of touch and go's followed by flapless, and glide landings and also go-aounds.
I cycle back to the hotel and arrive for 5:30pm. It's too late to phone home so it is back to the room for emails, food, beer, blog and revision.
I am looking forward to tomorrow.
Peewit
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