Getting Closer...just not fast enough

Well it’s January 14^th and I still have 2 more weeks before the ground school starts.  So what am I doing in the mean time… studying…lots and lots of studying.

With all of our kids will have multiple things going on, one of the biggest things was completing Matt’s Eagle Scout Project for Boy Scouts…whew am I glad that is done.  We built 5 carnival games for Tyler’s school; so they now have a Plinko game, a bumble bee bean bag toss, a color spinning wheel, football toss and fish ring toss, I hope the school likes the games.

In addition to that my wife and youngest son were involved in a car crash; both were okay but our Durango was pretty messed up…drivable, but messed up; so we have that to deal with also.

 

I’ve also started tracking my study habits as well as my health, mood and eating habits by using an app called Track and Share; pretty cool app that will let me see over time what is really going on with my eating, sleeping and health habits.  As far as my pursuit of a pilot’s license, I’m tracking my reading habits of Rod Machado’s Private Pilot’s Handbook, FAA Airplane Handbook, practice FAA test, training videos and the reading of METAR’s and TAF’s.  I’ve also started taking FAA Wings credit courses, just trying to take in everything I can.

 I’m really looking forward to see over time how my study habits graph out and where I might be lacking.

More to follow, hopefully I’ll post something before my ground school starts the end of January.

More good links...

http://flythewing.com/308/Home.html - Fly the Wing

http://flightaware.com/ - Real Time Flight Tracking

http://www.airnav.com/airports/ - Airport Directory

See ya in the air!

Let the dream begin...

Well it’s a new year…2013; after the long 2012 of batting throat cancer, turning 50 and losing over 100 pounds while trying to coach my son’s baseball team I needed to turn the page to a new year.

With a New Year come new challenges and a renewed sense of getting things done before time runs out; so to that I have committed myself to start my flight training in June. This has been a dream of mine from the time I was 7 or so and watched with my Dad as Apollo 11 land on the moon and a man walked amongst the heavens. I fell in love with aviation, read everything I could, followed the space program and never missed a launch or any of the coverage in between that and splashdown; all of it was amazing.

I took this love and enlisted in the Air Force landing a job where I actually flew! I was an in-flight maintenance technician onboard the SAC Airborne Command Post, better known as Looking Glass. I loved this job, never missed a flight unless I was bedridden sick and couldn’t move. I spent the next 12 years flying different platforms and accumulating over 5000 hours of flying time and never giving up on my dream to fly.

After getting out of the Air Force in 1992 and going through many life changes including kids, a divorce and several job changes I tried to take lessons in 2003 shortly after my youngest son was born. Well after amassing a whooping 7 hours of flying I had to give up the dream; as we know flying is an expensive hobby and with a new wife, new son, 3 kids and 2 step kids’ life kinda took over and left no room for flying.

Fast forward to 2012, the kids are grown; one in college, on graduating high school this year, one in 11th grade, one in 10th grade, one in 7th and one in 3rd grade and on March 7th I get diagnosed with throat cancer…Wow…what a shock, didn’t see that coming. Well after 4 rounds of chemotherapy and 35 rounds of radiation I get the news on November 30th that my latest scans showed no trace of the tumor and that I appear to be cancer free.

So I started to think, I just survived one of the scariest things anybody can go through…but it could’ve been different and there is much more I want to do in life…namely becoming a pilot.

With the blessing of my wife I made the decision to start flying the next June (the reason for June is to give me more time to recover from cancer treatments), but there is a lot to learn so I needed to get started now. Again with Julie’s blessing I started to purchase Rod Machado’s Private Pilot’s Handbook, some of the King School’s video’s as well as other things to get me going….it worked, I felt like a little school boy starting a new school year. I read everything I could, watched everything I could; YouTube is a great place for information.

I checked out a few of the FBO’s in the area and decided on taking my training at Advanced Air in Council Bluffs and when I contacted them I was told that they were putting together a ground school in late January…perfect.

My plan with this blog is to document my training from the ground school all the way through my checkride, so bear with me; I’m sure this blog will have plenty of ups and downs’ and I don’t mean takeoffs and landings…but my accomplishments and things I need to work on, as well as my feelings along the way.

Here are some good web sites to check out.

https://www.faasafety.gov/WINGS/pppinfo/default.aspx
http://www.m0a.com/
http://www.rodmachado.com/

Let the dream begin…