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.
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