The Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins With A Single Step

In my case, the first step began about a year or so ago and after many thought intensive bouts of pondering the meaning of life I finally decided that I wanted to fly; both for fun and for a career if I could pull it off.

After spending about 40 minutes in a P51D Mustang last summer (eternal thanks to my dearly beloved girlfriend Jan) I was hooked! I had to do this. I had to be a part of aviation and part of the world that has captivated my imagination for as long as I can remember.

This is the Mustang I flew in

Needless to say, life gets in the way every now and again but now I was ready to begin. The waiting was killing me.

The next step in this process was picking out a flight school.
After much research and looking into the available flight school options in the North Atlanta area, I finally decided on a school based out of PDK airport, the busiest General Aviation airport in the south from what I'm told.
There are some benefits to this. The first is that it has a control tower which means that you get very good practice at working with a control tower and coordinating your flight with everyone else trying to take off and land at the same time. Undoubtedly this will come in handy should I when I become ready to fly for an airline or just flying out to another airfield somewhere.

So anyway, Jan and I showed up for our scheduled intro flight on the 5th of October. I met my instructor for the day, Tom, and he got me situated in the flight simulator to test out my skills at the wheel... or yoke... before entrusting me with control of the aircraft. I don't blame him, I would probably do the same thing.

According to Tom my hours on the Microsofts Flight Simulator X had paid off and I seemed to have a knack for the simulator portion at least and could take off and fly around without too much difficulty.
The landing was another story... I had gotten familiar with the controls at home, but these were a little different. After about 3-4 tries and a little more education on approach angles and tips on vectors for the approach and bleeding off airspeed by pitching the plane up, or increasing airspeed by tipping the nose down or increasing power if I didn't have enough altitude, I was able to successfully land the aircraft. I did this a couple more times simply because it was fun. :)

So that portion was done and Tom felt confident that I wasn't going to be a problem for him in he cockpit, so we went out to the plane.



The trainers the school use are Cessna 172's. Fairly standard planes and "very forgiving" according to Tom. I'm going to be needing a lot of forgiveness while learning this, so I'm glad this is an option...
We went over the preflight check, ran through all the checklists and cranked up the prop. Got a brief class on communicating on the radio, taxiing to the runway and all the fun preflight stuff you get to do.
We then rolled onto the runway with the appropriate clearance, pushed the throttle in and off we went up to 2500 feet, or as close to it as I could keep it.

From there on out it was me at the controls. We took a flight up north, circled lake Lanier and headed back.



I'm definitely going to have to get my stomach used to the turbulence as it does get a little bumpy in a small plane. It was a nice flight, but after 30-45 minutes I was ready to get back on the ground again.
From what I hear this goes away after 3-4 flights, so fingers crossed...

Now just to get TSA clearance and a medical Certificate. Once I have that, I'm on my way to my Private Pilots license.