Shaping up to be a great team.

As a belated birthday present RTH took me up for a flight this weekend. It made up for the fact that I’d had to cancel my planned Cross Country on Saturday (More about that another time).

The weather has been kinda, meh, all weekend nothing outrageously horrible but not exactly great either.

RTH and I had a plane booked for a nice little afternoon three hour slot and we planned to go………. somewhere.

Nowhere in particular, just …..somewhere.

Conscious of the fact that this was meant to be fun, we decided on a nice, familiar lap around Lake Simcoe. Even I’m confident enough now that I could do this with minimal navigation issues and the Lake itself is very very pretty. Last time I saw it, it was still frozen. It would be nice to get a reminder that winter is well and truly behind us now.

We kept a careful eye on the weather, both agreeing that the threat of light showers didn’t concern us to much but the forecast cloud would mean keeping a close eye on our altitude.

We arrived to find that we’d been bumped from JES (both of us prefer her) to JPM (universally reviled), but at least the plane was there unlike the last few times we’ve attempted this where we’ve been waiting up to an hour for our plane to wander back.

Fuelled up and preflighted, we got ourselves settled in and started her up. Between me and RTH we are kind of in a weird situation at the moment. He’s the most experienced pilot with 120+ hours under his belt (and an actual license as opposed to a student permit) but I’m the most current.  I’ve flown fairly regularly in the last couple of years. He hasn’t.

The two are linked of course. I’m kind of stealing the “flying money” at the moment. Hopefully that’ll change soon.

RTH in his usual awesomeness, doesn’t make me feel bad about this at all (I still do, but hey), in fact he realises that I may actually be of some use up there, so he actually asks my opinion of things.

We were flying along in some bump air at 2500ft, discussing the height of the clouds and figuring out just where we might find some stable air. RTH was asking my opinion on whether it was worth climbing or not.

Despite it being a little on the sporty side (nowhere near “feisty” though), I wasn’t too concerned. It was the kind of weather I can tolerate flying in but don’t much like trying to do airwork in. I could see that RTH was wrestling a little with JPM.

Interestingly enough he was having exactly the same issues that I have with her.

“I just can’t get this damn plane trimmed out,” he complained. “and if I do , my airspeed is ridiculously low”

I sympathised that I’d run into the exact same issues with JPM. I just find her, twitchy, for the want of a better word. I constantly feel like I’m fighting her, whereas JES and, to some extent, SAR can usually be coaxed into doing what you want them to do.

As the flight unfolded we discussed general flying type things, altitude choices, routing, when to switch your strobes on, why the guy flying round Lake Skugog sounded like a Dalek on the radio and so on.

We really are shaping up to be quite a team up there, mutual respect for what each other is currently bringing to the table and the ability to recognise when someone has a better idea than you do.

RTH agreed that I’m getting much better as a passenger now, but I disagree. I’m not becoming a better passenger, I’m becoming a more effective co-pilot.

When I get my PPL , we are going to make a great flying team for sure.