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Deluminated
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Name: Jessie
Country: United States
State: Oklahoma
Metro: Tulsa
Gender: Female
Interests: Poetry. Storms. Nerddom + Academic Team. Photography. Staring at the night sky. Aviation, Airports, Anywhere Far Far Away. "Me and my indie rock." Books. Roar-y.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Medical
Message: message me
AIM:  Interrowhimper
Member Since:
2/4/2004
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| 4th of JulyI had strong nostalgia for last summer all day today. I was hearing "Three-County Highway" by the Indigo Girls in my head all day long, and missing Paige and Joe who celebrated while abroad this year.
My flight instructor urges me to stop freaking out and relax, in the face of my checkride. So I went out tonight, to Mitch and Otto's apartment, where there were Independence Day Festivities -- and the best view EVER of the fireworks, as they live in that needle building downtown.
It was very nice. I just got home.
I need to sleep, and to fly in the morning.
I will dream, anxiously, of airplanes.
Happy Independence Day.
I hope you blew some stuff up. That would make the Founding Fathers proud.
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| An early psychological modelAt some point during my childhood -- no one can remember, but maybe I was eight -- my father was discussing some item of business or other.
And at some point during that conversation, he turned to me and asked me what I thought his new business model should be -- or his new motto -- since the one he had going was frustrating him so.
And I thought for a second, and then I proposed this: "Beat everyone else."
It kinda fits with my personality today. That's still my model, for a lot of things.
I flew to Oklahoma City today with the express purpose of practicing approaches in the area, since my checkride looms and I was nervous -- only to find out that a navigational aid that I NEED for so many of the approaches I might be asked to fly on Monday is actually not working today. It'll be back up tomorrow.
And that means it'll be back up Monday.
Sigh.
Beat everyone else.
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| The Beatles. And a beautiful day wasted.I was just listening to 1, the Beatles compilation? Very contradictory songs, back to back: the first begs a lover to say that she doesn't want any diamond rings, thereby affirming true love. The second claims he can tell his girlfriend's in love with him because he buys her diamond rings.
...It made me blink.
Another no-fly day. I begin to be VERY stressed out, if that hasn't been evident before now.
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| Instructional KnowledgeSo I've been gaining instructional knowledge of late. How to explain power changes, the relationship between pitch and airspeed, the nuances of the low-enroute charts, the things that happen under the cowling of a C-172.
I'm also getting the other stuff that we don't train for until now. Like spins. I went to do my spin training (for real, not like when I went with OU) in a Cessna 152 last week, on a cloudless, windless day in which we had to elbow other student-instructor pairs aside for the right to use an airplane. We made the long, long climb to 6,500 feet (as air density decreases with altitude, so does the 152's performance -- by 6000 feet we were only climbing at 150 feet per minute).
And so I watched the demonstrated spin. The next time I had to observe the airspeed indicator (to observe that the airspeed doesn't change, due to the lack of airflow over the pitot tube in a spin) and the turn coordinator (to observe that the centrifugal force is all to the inside of a turn in a spin). The next time I had control of the power controls, so just the throttle and carburetor heat. For the next spin I had control of the rudders and the power controls. And then I had complete control.
At OU, I did less than a full rotation and recovered -- if I can be said to have recovered, since my instructor barely trusted me with the controls and didn't ever relinquish them during my "training". Which is perfectly legal, because all an instructor teaching a new instructor has to demonstrate is the entry into one spin and one recovery. But it's not actually helpful. Suppose one day I wanted to teach a class of CFIs -- I wouldn't know how to set up the intentional spin safely, let alone recover properly.
In my current course, they were pretty precise about it. I was required to be able to recover from the spin after a predetermined number of rotation and on a specified heading within 10 degrees. Which, as it turns out, if you understand the principles of spinning objects, isn't all that hard. It was very cool.
The gyroscopic instruments tumble in spins, giving completely inaccurate readings. That was pretty fun to witness.
And on the way back, I was taught how to demonstrate 0 or negative Gs. I did learn, however, when that demonstration is performed, it should be done with a sterile cockpit. And that, for once, means just what it sounds -- as we nosed over, trying to float a pen off the dashboard with the negative G force the plane developed, all the dirt on the floorboards floated into the air and settled on our laps.
G is for Gross.
Also, this morning we had honest-to-God vacuum system trouble. We always train for this, but I'd never seen it. The attitude indicator showed we were upside down for the first twelve minutes of taxi and runup. Since we were staying in the area and flying under visual conditions, this didn't matter -- it's an instrument we didn't need. During the runup, when we test the engine at high speeds prior to taking off, it spun. Rapidly. Like a potter's wheel or something. Pretty entertaining.
I'm done babbling, I think.
Flying is all I think about right now. All I read about. All I dream about, of late. It's pretty much saturated my life. I'm pretty okay with that right now, but I think once I'm finished with this course it'll be nice to have a little break.
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| On terror, and realizationNews came down today that my checkride is in Oklahoma City on July 7th. This terrifies me. The national pass rate remains at 20%, and while daunting testing statistics usually don't apply to me, this is something I want too badly to fail at. So I am studying. And lesson planning. And freaking out a bit.
I'm looking at pictures my dad took while my brother's family was in town this last week, and I just had this shocking realization that babies turn into people. Like, they're baby humans. I think I somehow got this static vision of babies existing in infancy in perpetuity as strange drainers of attention and resources, rather than people in this transient stage from non-existent to existent.
It was a pretty cool moment.
I have a pretty cool nephew.
I wish I got to see him more often. Since we're all just transient.
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