Following your dreams is not always easy. Especially in aviation. In aviation, or at least in the beginning, when you fly small planes and take your first steps, there will be periods when you have to wait. Plans rarely happen exactly as you imagine them. There will be changes, delays and cancellations of all kinds.
The weather
The weather is one of the factors in light aviation that you certainly do not control and cannot change to your liking. Countless times I have gone to the airport for a flight and returned without even sitting in the cockpit. In the best case, the forecast was accurate enough so that I didn’t even have to go to the airport.
An important part of the pre-flight preparation is checking the weather forecast, METAR and TAF for the airport from which we take off or the nearest one for which such a forecast has been issued; the airports along the route, if we are flying cross country.
During the pilot training, you fly under visual flight rules (VFR), which means that there are certain minimums below which visibility and cloud cover should not fall in order to maintain contact with landmarks.
On most days, such weather prevails, but especially in Bulgaria, in the period from November to February, you may have to wait a long time until conditions improve.
The instructor
Instructors are people. They, like you, have a life outside the plane, and this sometimes proves to be an obstacle to your flight. Instructors are late, which shortens the duration of the flight. For each flight of 1 hour, at least 30 minutes of additional time are needed for briefing before the flight and debriefing after. These are mandatory elements and should not be missed.
Therefore, if you have an allotted slot of 1:30 hours, and your instructor is 20 minutes late, it automatically means that your flight time for today will be 40 minutes instead of an hour.
In case of force majeure, when your instructor cannot come for a lesson at all, you may have to fly with another instructor from the school… if there is one. Usually, however, the schedule is full and there is no one to take you.
Personally, it has happened to me to be at the airport, ready for a flight, and to receive a call from the instructor that his dog is in a veterinary clinic and is about to undergo surgery, which is why we will not have a lesson today…
The technical problems
“Clear left, front, right. CLEAR PROP!” and nothing…. The cases in which I have not performed a flight due to a technical failure are more than the fingers on my hands. In winter, the battery can often fail and when you try to start the engine, the propeller turns once or twice and stops.
Another scenario is, for example, a faulty spark plug. Small planes with a piston engine almost always have two spark plugs per cylinder for better ignition of the fuel-air mixture. Before a flight, when checking the magnetos, if there is a faulty spark plug, the RPM would be significantly when switching between left and right magnetos (so as not to go into too many technical details, I will write a separate post about engine checks).
Again, we do not fly until this problem is fixed, which may mean that the plane remains on the ground for the rest of the day.
Your health
Never, ever underestimate your health when it comes to flying. If you don’t feel well on the ground, you certainly won’t feel better in the cockpit, practicing turns with a 45-degree bank angle or stalls, for example.
Whenever you go to the airport, you must be in good health, rested and definitely not hungover. Aviation and alcohol do not mix well. If you are not able to fly, skip the lesson - you will not receive a medal if you fly on this day when you do not feel well.
In conclusion
Patience is a virtue. The sooner you realise that some factors are out of your control and you manage to overcome the frustration, the smoother your flight training will go.
