Flying

 Last year I wanted to gift myself with some flying lessons.  I finally managed to do that earlier this month, and enrolled in the Top Gun Experience at AeroVenture, a local flying school.  The airport is about 20 miles (as the crow flies) from my house, or about a 35-minute drive.  It's six hours of instruction, 3 on the ground and 3 in the air, so NOT enough for a private pilot license, but enough to get started if you wanted to.

I took my first class on Wednesday.  We spend about 40 minutes in the simulator and talking about flight physics.  This was the simulator setup.  That's a few thousand dollars of equipment and a PC and monitor running the flight simulator application.

On Wednesday, I flew a Piper Warrior, which looks like this from the outside.

And like this on the inside:

Here I am in the student seat with head-gear.

Yesterday I flew a Cesna 172 Skyhawk:

These are the controls:

As part of my ground instruction, we planned the flight to my house, about 15 minutes (flight time) from the airport, and then took the plane out of the hangar.  Here's the overhead view (the instructor was flying while I took the picture).

I have one more flight, the Friday morning after Christmas.  This was an awesome experience. es evidenced by my ear-to-ear grin.