Saturday, March 03, 2018

Flying - It's A Little Early For A Biennial Flight Review, No?

One would think it is a bit early considering I've been licensed since August of 2017 and March 2018 - August 2017 is much less than 2 years,by oh, 18 months or so.

Well, not so much for DCT.

Unfortunately I did not fly there in December, January or February, so according to their policy I had to do a full frakin' flight review to be able to solo in their planes. YGTBSM.

So I got to take an instrucotr up and head to the practice area and it was basically a checkride - I did slow flight, power off and power on stalls, steep turns (which were actually pretty damn good for once, yay me!), turns around a point, s turns across a road and an engine out emergency practice and then some pattern.

I did ok but my crosswind landings could use a little work, what with the wind being about 10 knots from 040 and we were using Runaway 9L. The airport was busy as heck and they went to dual towers for the two runways - lots and lots of traffic there and in the practice area.

On the upside this was in their newer Piper Warrior II,

It's a sweet little plane and handled very nicely. Only annoyance is the tachometer is digital and in a hard to find spot low on the dash and hard to see in sunlight, but other than that its rather nice.

Would you believe I have to do a ground session to be qualified to fly solo with them and complete the flight review? Sheesh.

On the upside it moves the next biennial out two years from when this one ends, but that's not much of an upside.

I may need to start looking for a flying club as they're getting ridiculously busy and only allowing rentals in 2 hour blocks which doesn't give much in the way of cross country trip time. The only exception is one Piper Arrow and I'm not checked out or endorsed for a high performance airplane yet.

However, it was still a very nice day for a flight and I had a nice time with 1.4 pilot in command time and two landings.

6 comments:

MrGarabaldi said...

Hey Aaron;

Even a bad day of flying beats a good day at work....Just a thought....

Comrade Misfit said...

That BFR requirement is ridiculous.

You need to find a flying club (or buy your own).

Old NFO said...

Agree with CM... THAT is ass covering (and ripping off pilots)...

Aaron said...

MrGarabaldi: Very true.

Comrade Misfit: I know, I'm starting to look for a flying club due to both this idiotic requirement and their availability issues now. Can't afford a plane all for myself just yet.

Old NFO; Yep, that it is. Claiming its an insurance requirement is nonsense. Nobody else around has that kind of checkout requirement. I could understand a quick check flight to confirm I was ok and be current, but this is ridiculous.

B said...

Finda plane.

Finance it for 10 years.

It'll likely be worth that much or more in 5 as you bought it for.

SO really all you are out is insurance and hangar fees, plus actual hourly costs.

Comrade Misfit said...

If you have an airplane, you'll fly it more often. You can find decent PA28s in the 30K range. AOPA can help with financing. Nice thing about owning is that you always know the condition and if you want to go somewhere for awhile, there's no bullshit about minimum hours or any of that nonsense.

Or you find one or two friends to go into a partnership.