When Mac cleared me for solo, he told me that either he or John would still fly with me every third or fourth flight just to see how I was doing. Furthermore, since the coming months will be characterized by me going back east every other week, he said that if I miss a week or so of flying, that either he or John will go up just to help be get the cobwebs out.
So I had gone back east for a week, and was ready to fly, and John came with me.
We only went down to Brown Field and did a handful of take offs and landings, although it reiterated there are still a few things I have to learn.
For example…
Brown Field has two runways, one long and one short. I took off on the long runway and — upon reaching 500 feet — banked to the right as a prelude to entering the pattern. Well, unfortunately I had not reached the end of the runway (i.e., the numbers) and the controller did the equivalent of chew my butt over the air. I mentioned to John that I hadn’t known that you aren’t supposed to do that, and he said yeah, that’s the case. He let me do it knowing that the controller would chew my butt on the theory that that would drive the lesson home harder.
Other than that, it was all pretty vanilla.
When we got back to Montgomery, John started talking about clearing me to fly solo under Class B airspace (which is how we had to fly to and from Brown Field). And it drilled home that this solo thing was, in fact, a series of sequentially broader permissions.
And that was that.
Wind, Sand, and Stars 