Saturday, June 9, 2007

First ride

My wonderful wife bought me quite the unique Christmas present in '06, an introductory flight ride out at Butler Airport. So I head out there with my gift certificate for a airplane ride and pull into the parking lot forAirquest Aviation. Walk right up to the desk, present my certificate and there just happens to be an instructor just hanging out in the lounge who agrees to take me up. We walk out onto the tarmac and up to a pretty nice looking red and white Piper Warrior N624AQ, (he informed me of the make and model, I had no clue). We did the walk around, but unfortunately, this guy was about as talkative as a rock. So after pulling some info out of him (I tend to ask a lot of questions), we got loaded into the plane and off we taxied. Out to the end of the runway, he performed the "runup" after repeatedly slamming the door of this contraption to get it closed (worry?). The plane accelerated better than I thought it would and off we went for a trip over Lake Moraine. It was my first time in a long time in a GA airplane and I didn't recall how light they seemed, but we were certainly getting bounced around a lot from the turbulence. He let me feel out the controls a bit, and I really enjoyed being able to turn the plane this way and that, even though I'm sure he was doing most of the work. After about a 1/2 hr, we turned back and he had me follow the line on the GPS back to the airport. We got in the pattern and he executed an rather "interesting" landing in some very gusty conditions. So to make a long story short, I was totally hooked, I loved it, and am going to start looking into options as to how I can learn to fly!