Today I had a lesson at 3:00pm with my usual instructor, Ami Kaufman. Since he was going out of country I was afraid that this would be my last time flying with him for a while but fortunately I will still get to fly with him at least once more before he leaves. I was also able to take a good friend of mine, Charles Rubinoff, who I graduated college with, on my lesson so I could get some good photos to put on the site.

After all of the usual preflight checks and procedures, we made our call to Van Nuys ground and began our taxi to hold short of 16R. There was a slight wind coming from the East but it didn’t affect takeoff too much. We made our right crosswind departure over Warner Center and I learned a little more about using the Nav when my instructor set a heading for Fillmore. We followed the heading but stopped at our usual training spot above Simi Valley.

We did a lot of review work but I was happy to do so because I want to make sure my maneuvers are as close to perfect as possible. Today I actually felt my steep turns getting better and I was able to rely more on visuals and keep my eyes off the instruments. I still need work on maintaining altitude while doing a steep turn but I am sure that will come with practice.

The next thing we did was some more stalls. Again, this is something else I feel myself getting a bit more confident with. I am able to keep a heading more accurately while maintaining proper airspeed. We followed the stalls up with some slow flight for a bit then gained some airspeed and altitude for some ground reference maneuvers.

We started our ground reference training with turns around a point in which we used an overpass on the 118 freeway as our marker. After a couple of passes we used that point to begin our rectangular course. We followed the surface streets below us to fly rectangular patterns and after doing that a couple of times we used the 118 freeway as our reference and finished up our lesson with some S-turns.

We made our way towards the Santa Susana Pass and after getting information from ATIS, we made a call to Van Nuys tower for landing. Keeping our eyes open for some traffic that the ATC mentioned, we made our approach and landed on 16R.

I logged another 1.1 hours and am amazed how fast my training seems to be going. I started the week I graduated college and already have 9.9 hours (and will most likely be at 11 hours by next week). A lot of the articles I read, whether online or in the AOPA magazine, mention that an airport is not jst a place to fly but a place to network with other pilots. After my lesson I stuck around for a bit talking to my instructor and to a couple of other PPL students and sometimes that can be a learning process all in itself.

I want to thank Charles for all the photos he took.