Anticipation

Sometimes it’s hard for me to get my head around how much my outlook on this flying business has changed. When Bob casually asked me to bring down my charts to our next lesson so that we can start looking at my cross country flight planning, I was massively excited.

I’ve gone from thinking “OMG-HOW-AM-I-EVER-GONNA-FIGURE-THIS-OUT” in a panic stricken way to a more quizzical “Hmm, I wonder how I’m going to figure this out?” train of thought.

Because I know I will figure it out eventually, with some help of course. More on that later. At the moment I’m just really psyched up about this. It represents real, proper flying as opposed to tarmac bashing in the circuit. It’s going to be a totally different experience. Just like my first foray out of the circuit on my own was, where my first comment to RTH was “I wish someone had told me that an hour of flying on your own is a lot less stressful than an hour of circuits on your own!”

The cross country flight represents a new challenge but one that I feel I can master, albeit eventually!

I have help available to me. Bob has sent me some help sheets that I’m currently plowing my way through; I’ll take it one step at a time. I’m content to tackle one hurdle at a time and won’t beat myself up if I get something wrong. I guess I’m confident enough now that I don’t feel the need to beat myself up over every mistake. They’re gonna happen. I’ve also resisted the urge to get RTH to walk me through every step. For sure he knows how to do this but I need to get the confidence to tackle this on my own. Rather than agonising over every line drawn on my chart, I need to get stuck in and give it a go.

I’m still excited though!