Day 3: Much, much better than day 2

My mother will appreciate this more than anyone 

So this was a later lesson then the last one, and it ended up being a half day flight and half night flight. This time my instructors name was Mark. Like the last time, we quickly went through the preflight checklist so we can spend as much time flying as possible. 

Tonight ended up being half a day flight and half a night flight, so I got to experience the best of that sunset plus some night flying, which is really cool...especially if you could see the way they light up the runway for you. There is literally a giant white arrow blinking towards the longer of the two runways. You'd have to be blind to not see which runway you were supposed to land at.

For flight school, you basically run the same rectangular pattern over and over again. You take off, and once you reach about 50 knots you start to ascend to roughly 900ft and hold that altitude for the duration, while maintaining at least 60 knots. 

One kind of funny observation I noticed was on the second to last turn, there is a Target store on the ground that you can see quite clearly at night. I found myself aiming for the Target symbol as a reference point for roughly the right heading I was supposed to maintain, which ended up being pretty accurate!

Now while I didn't get to practice any hovering this time, I will fortunately say that the cyclic control made oh so much more sense to me this time around. I really felt like the commands I gave produced the results I wanted this time around. Granted, I have a ton of fine tuning to learn, but at least the movements I made on the stick made more sense to me.

Landing is another thing. I won't go into too much detail, but there is a lot more movements to landing a helicopter then you would think, so I'll more than likely be working on that the next time around.

I leave tomorrow for a week in Tampa, so I won't get any flying in until probably another week and a half. More to come then!