Lesson ten: Solo?

Well I spent the week filling out my presolo exam, which started off easy, but by the end I was beginning to struggle a bit. A lot of the questions on the test I hadn't had any real exposure to. Had I watched more of the King Flight School videos that I have, I would have had a much easier time with the test, unfortunately I didn't realize this until after passing in the exam.

After spending the week working on my test, and keeping myself awake at night thinking about having to solo, Saturday finally came. I slept in as late as I could so I wouldn't have to think too much about what was going to happen, unfortunately it didn't work...I just did my thinking in bed.

I arrived at the airport, and my instructor went over my exam as I looked on. A couple of times he stopped and would give his opinion on some of the answers the FAA wants to hear, and a couple times he stopped to ask me a question directly from the test. My instructor said I did well on the exam, and so it was off to fly. We were running behind schedule at this point, so my instructor helped me with the preflight, something he hasn't done since the first couple of lessons. We preflighted quickly, and were off in the pattern doing touch and goes.

My flare out, and landings are actually pretty good, but I am having a bit of trouble doing things consistently in the pattern, which makes each landing a guessing game for me. I don't know until the last 10 seconds if I am in a good position to land or not, but I manage to touch down pretty smoothly regardless it seems.

After a few landings my instructor asked me how I felt about flying the airplane alone, and all I could answer was "I don't know". I knew I could fly the airplane myself, but I don't think I really wanted to. There was a tiny bit of turbulence in the air, and ATC had made me extend my downwind twice, and made me fly a left traffic pattern (typically right at my airport) already. Had it been a perfectly calm day, with no other traffic, I think I would have been ready, but today I just didn't feel it.

We did a couple more landings until making a full stop. At this point I still wasn't sure if this was the moment he was going to get out and tell me "good luck". That moment never came though, and I am fine with that. I had put too much pressure on myself about soloing today, and my nerves were off the charts. Now that today is over, and I didn't solo, my nerves are gone. I know I will be soloing soon, but for some reason the nerves have disappeared.

Today's lesson was a quick one, with just 0.9 hours on the hobbs ($81.00), and an additional 0.6 hours of ground instruction from my CFI ($67.50 for 1.5 hours).