NORDO

With my family out of town for the next week I plan to take advantage and fly like there's no tomorrow. Hopefully the weather gods will be more kind than last year when I got 20% of my bookings in when the left town.

After completing a briefing about the procedures to and from the practice area I decided to take care of two bookings in one since I had all day. The routes to and from the practice area had changed since my last flight out there and to be honest this made me happy. No more struggling with those impossible power lines. The new "routes" make a lot more sense and provide much better traffic separation laterally between the airport and the practice area - and also the entry/exit points of the practice area itself.

It felt great to finally leave the circuit. My first level off check, flying straight and level, and even doing a fuel lean seemed exciting.

Once we got out to the are we did a number of exercises which included a lot of slow flight, stalls, steep turns, and spiral dives. We then moved into Forced approaches, more slow flight, more stalls, and finally topped it off by simulating NORDO on the way back to the airport.

Since this was a double session we were in the air doing this stuff for a long time. Not only was I exhausted and thirsty, I also was starting to feel not so good a lot. If there was anything that I learned today - it was that the checks we do to make sure we are "safe" for flying are important. I can completely see how an exhausted pilot could make a number of errors.

At the same time - I realize that I really need to focus on the precision required to execute exercises within the proper envelope. Slow flight needs a lot of work. The NORDO portion of the flight was awesome. I really loved it ;)