hmmmm

recent conversation between me, and my flight instructor Tim:

me: "hey, uh, we are at 1600 ft, thats the traffic pattern altitude for this field."
tim: "yup"
me: "well thats fine, but the airfield is at 500 feet, its in a valley, 1600 feet is going to be scraping the tops of those mountains."
tim: "yeah well....hmm...uh....just dont hit the mountains."

genius. pure genius.

great weekend of flying. i had my first spinning experience. it was intentional, i wanted to see what it was like. remember in top gun when mav and goose are flying with iceman and they fly through the "jet wash" and mav's engines flame out and they go into a "flat spin, theyre headed out to sea" and they "eject eject eject" but silly goose crashes into the canopy, breaks his neck and dies? thats kinda like the spin i did, only we werent flat, we werent headed out to sea, nor were we in an f-14. picture a plane, now imagine trying to balance it on your fingertip. now tip the nose down a bit and the smack the nose so that it spins around on your finger with the nose pointed down and the tail up in the air. thats a spin. it was ridiculously cool. we did a bunch of them, and i could have stayed there all day and done them. so that solves that, aerobatics here i come.