Electronic Pilot Logbook

One night I was online lookin up a tail number. One of the links that google showed took me to a webpage called flightlogg.in; a free electronic pilot logbook.
There I was able to see somebody's pilot logbook, somebody from ATP since the tail number was a PA-44 from ATP. It was very interesting, the guy was now flying for American Eagle and his logbook showed all this cool flights on an ATR. Then I got curious and turned to page 1, just about 3 years ago! There was his first solo, his first cross countries, his checkrides.. then I clicked to a link that said maps. Holly guacamole! I got hooked! This is amazing! You can see on the map all the flights, if there were solo, dual given, received, PIC, SIC, etc. You can see how many flights you have on each airplane, type.. It gives you a lot of information and the best part.. It is free and you just need to use your google account.. or yahoo.. or whatever..
I have heard of electronic pilot logbooks before, but never really paid attention to them. I wasn't really interested in logging my flight time electronically, I already had a logbook, why would I log my times twice? Why bother? Well now I got hooked! I entered all the flights on my logbook and I love it!! Here are some screenshots of my flight life!

2 more instrument flights

Last weekend I had the opportunity to fly both on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday was choppy, lots of turbulence but I managed to do some descent approaches into Athens. Still I made some stupid mistakes that pissed me off (forgot to retract the landing gear after takeoff, didn't set climb power after 1000 ft, and lost 150 ft of altitude while trying to maintain heading.
Sunday was a total different thing, the air was smooth and my instructor decided he would do a mock checkride. This would be his last day at ATP. We took off and this time I had my game on;  I was totally focused, I was making small corrections to maintain heading and altitude, totally dominated the GPS for the approaches, having my next frequencies ready ahead of time, I did pretty good and I'm very happy now. We shoot the VOR DME Arc from AHN into KWDR, then did the published missed,  the RNAV approach at the same airport, and finally we were vectored into the ILS to 31 where the instructor cut one of the engines and I managed it perfectly without loosing my LOC CDI.
I am still studying every night for the oral test. My next flight or sim should be this weekend with my new instructor.

I can smell my instrument rating

On the flying side, I've had only one flight since my last post. An RNAV into Rwy 2 at Athens (KAHN) and the ILS to 27 at the same airport. I did some stupid mistakes that  really pissed me off, altitude and heading mistakes, some communication mistakes. I went to the school early next day to correct my mistakes on the sim; I flew about 4 hours on it and that was last weekend. The rest of the week I have devoted my self into studying the Instrument Jeppesen book from cover to cover and answering all the quizzes at the end of each section.
After I finish it, I will review my Sporty's videos again and the King School course.. I am using all the resources available to me, I really want to ace this checkride which I'm thinking it will come on the second weekend of March.
I have 4 more training flights before my check ride; the next one will be this weekend and also it will be my instructor's last weekend, so it will be interesting.

10 night takeoff and landings and study study study

I have flown one more time since my last post. This was a night flight where the goal was to do 10 takeoffs and landings at a towered airport. My instructor had 23PE all fueled up for me and I just had to get there in the evening to do the preflight. If you are flying at night you need to check all the lights make sure they are all working fine. This time not of all them did.
I turned the battery on and immediately went outside and see that the white tail light was burned, I was not sure at the moment if that was a required light for night flying. I texted my instructor and told him about the problem. He was not 100% sure either so we went inside the office and checked the FARs. Of course is a required light, it is an anti collision light. Anti-collision lights are not only the green and red lights you see on the wingtip, the white one on the back is also one. When a pilot is looking at a traffic at night that's how he can tell your direction of movement, if he sees white that means that you are flying away from him and he is looking at your rear.
There was another seminole at the ramp, I checked the lights and they all worked fine. We towed it to the fuel pump and departed PDK towards LZU.
 When approaching LZU there were 5 arrivals at the same time, my instructor was surprised; usually by that time the airport is pretty quiet. I really enjoyed my 9 takeoffs and landing. LZU doesn't have PAPI or VASI so it is a good challenge to calculate the approach for landings, specially at night.
We departed the airport when the tower was closing and I did my last landing at PDK for the night.

After this flight I have just been studying a lot for my oral test, I have 4 more flights until my checkride, this is going fast even though I am on the self paced program.
I have been in the sim several times also, with cool scenarios like the one departing Riverside, CA where you need to hold on PDZ VOR until you reach enough altitude to cross the mountains and go to Las Vegas. The other scenario was departing from Jacksonville towards Wilmington but diverted to Myrtle Beach due to icing.

This weekend's weather doesn't look good, let's see how it goes.

Long IFR XC and long VFR Commercial night XC

Tuesday - February 7th


I was very excited because this was going to be one of the longest if not the longest XC I have ever done. We were supposed to go to Daytona Beach with stops at Jacksonville Craig and St. Augustine. However, when I arrived to the school, my instructor told me that plans had to be changed due to weather.. I got a little disappointed since the weather at PDK was amazingly beautiful. I took a glance at my ForeFlight App and there it was: IFR conditions were forecast for the south of Georgia and Northeastern Florida. We could go the on an IFR flight but the night flight on our return had to be VFR.
We then started looking at the map, the only good option was Meridian, MS. again. the flight had to be over 250nm with 3 different approaches to 3 airports so we did KPDF-KJFK-KTLC-KMEI with an ILS approach to Walker, Co-Jasper (KJFX) a VOR approach to Tuscaloosa (KTLC) and a RNAV approach to Meridian (KMEI). ATP has a policy that this flight must always be to KPDK-KCRG-KSGJ-KDAB, the instructor had to call dispatch to request authorization for this flight and he got approved so off we went.
The flight went smooth and I was able to do all three approaches with minimum intervention from the instructor, I just need a little more experience with the Garmin GNS430.
ATC advised all aircraft that the MOA's were active; Meridian has a lot of military training so ATC was routing us away from those.  A military operations area (MOA) is "airspace established outside Class A airspace to separate or segregate certain nonhazardous military activities from IFR Traffic and to identify for VFR traffic where these activities are conducted.

We landed at Meridian, the marshall showed us the way to park and we went inside Meridian Aviation for some free hot dogs and ice cream, I love this FBO.
Our way back had to be a night flight 300nm total distance at night with the first landing at 250nm from the point of departure. We planned for a flight from KMEI to KWDR, then landing at KLZU and finally at KPDK. I was a little tired but just imagining myself flying at night to 3 destinations on a long cross country.. that was a dream come true.. and just that thought took any tiredness away and 1 hour after sunset we departed Meridian for a night flight, we were routed through a Victor Airway between some active MOA's and after a while we were cleared direct to KWDR; we used pilot controlled lights, landed a little hard and then taxied back for the short hop to KLZU; the tower was already closed there, (they close at 9pm). I believe is mostly because people complain of airplane noise... I wonder why on the first place would you live near to an airport if the airplane noise bothers you. Come on!
Then we landed at PDK; the landing was better than the last two. The seminole doesn't flare as good as the C172; you need to land with a tiny bit of power just like a soft field landing.

On Thursday (actually tonight) I will be doing 10 takeoffs and landings at night at a towered airport. As always, I can't wait! I'm halfway through my instrument checkride already.

 Meridian Aviation

Enjoying the goodies at Meridian

More instrument training and written tests.

Saturday, Feb 4th 2012
So the plan was to fly 2 hours practicing approaches. I was scheduled to arrive at 9:00 am. The weather was very close to minimums so it was very likely that no flight was going to be held today. So my instructor and I decided that we should do some sim work and practice the approaches for our next long XC flight which will be KPDK-KCRG-KSGJ-KDAB and back.. I am so looking forward to that flight, It is a requirement for the Commercial License

61.139(b)(4)(i)
One cross country flight of not less than 300nm total distance with landings at a minimum of 3 points, 1 of which is a straight line distance of at least 250nm from the original departure point.

 On the sim we did a VOR, RNAV and ILS approach to these airports..  after we were done I went into the study room at ATP to study for the written.
Another new is that my instructor got the job at Expressjet! I am very happy for him, he starts in mid March, I'm not sure If I'll be able to finish up my instrument rating before he leaves, I hope I do.  
After 2 hours of studying I went outside to take a break, the clouds were breaking up so we decided to fly. While I preflight N23PE the instructor was deciding on what we were going to do.. we departed at 2:00 pm towards Greensboro, GA (3J7)for a GPS approach to runway 7. This time I managed most of the radio communications. PDK is a beehive airport, with a lot of traffic and a complex diagrams with 4 runways and a bunch of taxiways and different procedures than a normal towered airport. It gets confusing but I was able to get my clearance, taxi instructions and takeoff clearance without any problems.
This flight had some parts with clouds, It is awesome to fly under IMC. I did the approach without any problems and then we went back to PDK for an ILS to 20L. Instructor shut off the engine and I managed it very well.
Sunday Feb 5th
Super Bowl Sunday. Patriots VS Giants.
I stopped by Dunkin Donuts today to get some treats to the people at school. I was not sure If I was ready to take the instrument written test today.  I did a mock test on my Ipad and got a 92% so I decided to take the test so I could get that out of the way.
It took me a little bit more than 2 hours. It wasn't easy. I got an 87 which I feel pretty happy with. Then I took the CFII written also; it is pretty much the same question bank so I decided to do it as well and scored an 84. I feel relaxed now that those are out of the way now. On Tuesday we have scheduled our almost 7 hour flight to Daytona and back. That is going to be awesome!
For now, we are going to our Colombian friend's house to watch the Super Bowl and celebrate!!

 The Propeller Brand

Thank you for reading.