Flight Lesson 11 and getting to the airport on public transportation

I headed up to Hamilton airport today for my 11th flight lesson. Seeing as how I don’t have a car these days, I took the Hamilton Street Railway (HSR). Getting to the airport on the HSR is a bit of an adventure. You see, I live in the west end of Hamilton so I have to take a bus into downtown, where I transfer to a bus that goes up the mountain. The end of the line for this second bus is the Mountain Transit Centre, some 5 km away from CYHM. From the MTC I pay an extra $0.50 and a taxi takes me to the airport. This is the trans-cab system.

The system works pretty well. I only had to wait about 5 minutes and the cab was there. On the way back I didn’t have to take it since a nice lady from the school who was going my way offered me a ride.

The Lesson

Today we spent about an hour in the class room going through the briefing for spins, landings, the circuit, takeoffs, spirals, steep turns and departure stalls. Kenny was very impressed with my knowledge since I basically did all the talking. I’m really into the whole flying thing so I read and try to understand as much as I can before going in to a lesson.

After the ground briefs I headed out to FTDS to do its walk around and caught my first glimpse of a Piper Tomahawk, GTGX:

I’ve been handling the radio more and more and I’m more and more at ease with it. I’m not choking on my words any more. We took off runway 06 and made a right turn to 180 and headed towards our training area near the Nanticoke power plant. It was a beautiful day for flying, not a cloud in sight apart from the grime hanging in the air above the power plant: