Last night, I was a student pilot, about to take my first solo flight. However, the aircraft was quite unconventional. It was effectively a huge treehouse with a rocket engine underneath. However, I was getting ready for the trip, readying the machine and double-checking everything.
At one point, my instructor came out to help me, and gave me a flight bag and a bunch of paperwork to fill out. Since I was so inexperienced, I needed a lot of help with the papers. For example, there was one paper, the weight and balace form, that also had some other weird information needed. I had to fill out all the reference airspeeds for different phases of flight. I remember seeing the slow flight airspeed and trying to figure out how to find it. My instructor told me that it was on the back of the paper. I had to look through a lot of terms to find it, but finally I did. I also had to write out the total distance of the trip, which I think ended up being around 6,347 miles.
At some point I finished my paperwork, and was getting ready to be on my way. However, just then, I heard a noise off the balcony of the treehouse airplane, and I looked over the edge to see a girl I like and one of her friends. They were just walking around, but I guess somehow they got invited on the flight because they had some suitcases and eventually were hoisting them up to me. I scurried around for a bit, judging the weight of all the luggage with my arms to ensure that we weren't overweight. As I did this, I took a closer look at my ship. It had two bedrooms and a bathroom, and my copilot was putting luggage and clothing away. Another thing I noticed was that it was winter, and while there was snow on the ground outside, the roads were clear. It was a fairly dry winter day.
As I sat back down at the flight desk, I tried to secure the flight bag by looping some rings on the straps through hooks attached to the underside of the desk. I also looked behind me and saw that this particular aircraft had some accommodations for children, namely some wooden steering columns that kids could pretend to be pilots with. At that point, I realized that I needed to start my taxi down to the runway so I could take off. But first, I needed to make the call to the tower. I wasn't able to reach them on my radio, so for some reason I decided to jump down to the ground to do it. I then did so. On the way down, I realized several things: my instructor was on the ground, yelling at me to get moving or else I wouldn't make my flight, I had the radio in my hand still and it was flashing with red and green lights, and a car was driving up. Just then an invisible force picked me back up, as a suburban drove over the spot where I would have lain moments before. The force swung me all the way up onto the main platform of the aircraft, and I resumed readying myself for the trip.
The next thing I can remember is sitting in some sort of control room inside a building. A bunch of middle-aged pilots were talking about air routes, and I overheard them say that the city of Atlanta was a mere 19 miles away, while my hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia was something like 50 miles away, over the mountains. They were talking about how this flight was really boring and kind of lame, and I felt a little bad, because I thought I remembered loving the trip.
That's it.
No comments:
Post a Comment