Thank you for sharing your story – it has given me hope and, if possible, inspired me even more to move forward with becoming a private pilot!

I went through the pre-flight inspection myself and got most of it right, expect when I embarrassed myself by pointing to the flaps when it said fuselage. There are more parts to a plane than a person’s body.

We worked on taxiing. If you see a small Grumman wobbling like a drunk man, it’s me practicing how to go left and right on the ground. It made a big difference when I pulled my seat up close enough to reach the top of the rudder. Still seems like a strange place to put brakes to me.

My oratory skills are lacking – so much to learn – because instead of “Guthrie Airport, Grumnan eight nine uniform,” I said, Grumnan eight nine uniform Grumnan.” Oops. At least, I tried this time.

Finally in the air, we practiced the same thing as the first lesson. Ascending, circles, and descending. Or as he wrote – climbs, glides and turns. Not smooth, and only messed up seriously a few times on the rudder. If he would have said left rudder when turning left, and right when turning right, that would have helped. Maybe he assumed any logical person would know that. Who said an accountant was logical? Or maybe he said it and I missed it during the trauma of the first lesson.

Glen added our first maneuver. “Maneuver” sounded a little scary, but we did ground tracking. Never heard that term before, but he said to circle the town of Crescent. Since he didn’t say which way, I assumed he meant a left circle since we had just circled right, so I lost sight of the darn town pretty quickly. Couldn’t see anything out the left side of the plane since I’m still sitting on the right side. I bull’s eyed city hall.

We landed safely, and although he said to stay with him on the landing, I allowed him the privilege of being in control. As if he wasn’t all along.

I had gone to the airport expecting my instructor to do everything close to the ground and I might get to “play” when up high. I get to the airport and he goes, “So, we could spend an hour going over how to inspect the plane, and do a briefing, or we could just go out and fly, what do you want to do?”. What do I want to do? You’re the instructor, how am i supposed to learn this stuff? He says we’ll just go fly and see how it goes.

We walk out to the plane, and he shows me the checklist and asks me to verbalize everything as I go through it and of course, I was terrified of flipping any switches. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen. I remember trying to taxi for the first time and trying to use the yoke as a steering wheel in a car. I had such a difficult time at first (negative transfer of learning ). We get to the runway, do a quick runup, and I remember swerving all over the runway while accelerating. I remember what speed he said to try to lift off at, and I felt like if I didn’t “yank” it back, we’d lose control on the ground! We climb out and we just fly. Nothing special. He tried to get me to just hold a heading and altitude and gentle turns basically.

I know as a VFR pilot, you really should be using the horizon as an attitude indicator, but my eyes were so glued to the instrument panel. I remember him saying “Ok, adjust the throttle to this rpm”… ok. “turn right”..how far? “stop now”. I remember him saying ok, adjust throttle more (more? add more or take away? What are we doing?), I just guess and pull more out, and he says to add some flaps and slow down. OK… Turn left.. ok… turn left… Then it hit me. “Oh crap. I am landing. that runway is right in front of me.” I don’t think that landing was pretty, but I was practically doing everything from the beginning (he was controlling rudder while flying and doing radios).

It was a unique experience that will last a life time! Great Story and keep it up!