One more milestone...

I knocked off another milestone today... I have passed the 15 hour minimum of solo time required for a PPL.

Trevor was away this weekend, and no other instructor was available so I decided to build up the solo hours... I had not planned to break the 15 hour minimum, it just turned out that way.

It was a simply fantastic day for flying today... blue skies, a light breeze (just enough to keep you on your toes when landing) and a cloud base high enough to enable forced landing (FLWOP) practice...

First flight of the day I took JFY and went to practice my compass turns some more. I am fairly confident with these now, having figured out that I was rolling out too soon and too hard. Like most things when flying, nice and smooth is the secret ;) Now I just need to work on the mental arithmetic required to work out the correction factors...

Then I nailed a couple of FLWOP's and headed back to the field for a couple of circuits. Unfortunately, I got stuck behind what I suspect was a relatively newly solo student doing circuits so large that a battleship would have been ashamed of them! After getting a little frustrated I called a full stop on the 3rd circuit. On the positive side, I got some good flapless practice due to the extended downwind legs ;)

After a bit of a pit stop I headed back out to the Training Area in ETZ... I was working on keeping my eyes outside and trying to fly by attitude instead of looking at the instruments... nice and challenging!

Did some Steep Turns and some more FLWOP practice... then decided to take a bit of a Tiki-tour about the Training Area. The training area was very busy with several aircraft practicing forced landings, a couple doing parachute drops and glider activity as well. However, everyone was making position reports so things went pretty smoothly.

After a lap of the TA, I headed back to Ardmore (dodging a tow-plane and glider), did an overhead join and slotted into the traffic for some circuits finishing with a nice shortfield landing on the grass.

A fantastic days flying...

This flight: 1.3 Solo + 1.5 Solo
Total Hours: 72.0 (56.9 Dual, 15.1 Solo, 3.2 IFR)