I PASSED!

Sorry I haven't had much of a chance to blog for the past week or so, but here's a bit of a recap of my last few days.

On Thursday, I spent all day with my sponsor, Frank. We basically did a crash course in everything flight related and went through the entire study book for review before I had to take my test on Friday. It was a lot of studying. I spent a lot of my time taking practice tests online and going through the practice questions in my text book. I'm a bit tired of multiple choice questions at this point, but nevertheless I pressed on question after question as I received diagrams and explanations to my questions about the questions, yikes, that's a lot of questions. Thursday night I wasn't really sure what to do, I was a bit "studied out" so I just took one more practice test before a good night's rest.

Friday morning I drove down to Burke Lakefront Airport in downtown Cleveland to take my flight exam. I'm glad I was slightly early though because I had to do a few circles in my car and a few walks around the airport to figure out where I was going, as well as a few maneuvers around a 1st grade field trip to the Women in Aviation museum. Eventually I figured out where I was going. As I walked into the flight academy, all eyes were on me when I asked where to go to take my exam. Flying is still a very sexist profession and I'm pretty sure all of the older men in the flight academy thought I was joking when I asked for my exam. Soon I was taken to a very small, over heated room with three computers set up for FAA testing. In the room adjacent to mine, I could hear air force trainees preparing for an exam. After 60 multiple choice questions, a little over an hour of my time, and plenty of calculations, I passed my exam with 88% correct! I'm pretty sure when the receptionist announced my score to me, all of the men in the room dropped what they were doing in awe of the situation. After it was over, I spent a few minutes conversing with one of the flight examiners at the academy and I set up my appointment to go flying on Monday morning with my instructor.

Today I arrived at the county airport where Kevin and I spent all day running around trying to figure out how to fly the Cessna 152. We were both told that the radio was replaced after the incident last week, but it still did not seem to work. After plenty of time trying and mechanic failure, we decided that the safer option would just be to wait and fly a different plane. I have a special appointment set up for tomorrow night in a Cessna 172, which is just the bigger version of the 152. Hopefully all should go well tomorrow and I will start flying two-a-days on Monday, Wednesday and Friday in order to solo by next Wednesday. It will be very tough to solo with all of these delays, but still possible as long as we don't have any more speed bumps along the way and the weather stays pristine!