Yesterday Steven did his first flight as a private pilot and I got to ride in the front!

Ha. You guys. I’ve been wanting to ride in the front for a long time. I’ve really wanted to see what you have to do to fly a plane. There’s like a zillion gauges, and the yoke, and pedals, and comms, and etc. etc. I’m determined to learn what all this s-word is!

Plus I wanted to see the view. Turns out I needed to make my seat higher and the windshield needed to be cleaned. Next time.

ANYWAY! We were originally planning to fly down the lakeshore to see the Chicago skyline but the low clouds were not conducive to that. So we flew from Waukegan (UGN, our home airport) to Burlington, WI (BUU) and back. I’m glad we still got to fly at all! I was waiting ALLLLLLL week for this.

The entire time Steven was learning to fly he used analog maps (called sectional charts) and the GPS in the plane. Yesterday though, he brought the iPad and we connected ForeFlight (a flight planning, traffic, weather, etc. app) to the WiFi on the plane so we could see traffic. I realized I was watching that too closely on the way to Burlington and Steven was like “I’ve flown this entire time without it, don’t stare at it.” Ha, I needed that reminder, and didn’t look at it much on the way back. (It’s pretty handy though, it tells you which frequencies airports use, how much runway you have left, traffic, weather, if traffic is close to you, etc. etc.)

I had a lot of fun, looking at the view, trying to follow what ATC (air traffic control) was telling us, trying to decipher what ATIS (automatic terminal information service) was saying, paying attention to what Steven was doing. I can’t wait to go again (maybe tomorrow!)!