Not that I've spent the last two months sitting around doing nothing. Amongst other things, I've learned to read METAR weather reports, meaning that I left the house yesterday and headed to the airport feeling quite confident in what the weather was going to throw at me. Of course, what I'd failed to appreciate is that I was only reading what the weather was doing when I left, not what it was doing when I was sitting on the runway. But still, my instructor was happy enough to go up, and up we went.
Same aircraft as last time, incidentally. I've decided that if I get the same one on the third lesson, I'm going to start referring to it as mine. It's probably the closest I'll get to ownership of a plane, anyway.
Almost immediately after the wheels left the tarmac, we hit a bit of a crosswind and ended up climbing at what, to my mind, was a rather unusual angle. I'd been sitting in the flying school waiting room watching takeoffs earlier, and none of those pilots had done this! Mind you, the last few aircraft I'd seen were a bunch of 737s, 767s and a 777, so I'm not sure the comparison to a little C-152 works. Again, the instructor got me away from the busier airspace around the airport, and pointed me in the direction in which we were to go. The combination of wind and the fact that we'd had some fleeting but intense sunshine earlier which had warmed the ground up nicely made for interesting flying. Pointing the aircraft in the direction I wanted to go didn't really achieve anything, we'd soon end up pitching over to the side in what I considered quite an alarming fashion. A look across at the right hand seat revealed my instructor, happily looking out of the window with his hands on his lap; "OK," I said to myself, "if he's not flapping, neither will I", and carried on.
We pitched over again 30 seconds later, and I found myself in a flap. He had a word. Told me that this sort of thing was what they'd consider perfectly normal summer weather (well, British Summer Time didn't end until this morning, so I'll give him that one), and that I'd just have to go with it. So I started going with it, persuading the aircraft back on course after each little episode. Although I didn't like it, at least mother nature and I reached an understanding with each other. And so, being British, the conversation turned to the weather. He pointed out a cloud to me, and commented on the sort of conditions we'd expect to find if we got too close.
"Is that a lenticular cloud?", I asked
"Yes"
"I used to work with a glider pilot, and he was quite prone to pointing out clouds to me."
"Ah. They love them. Mind you, they carry parachutes."
We flew across the city; I got to see my office from an unfamiliar angle, and discovered that the building is even uglier from above than it is at street level. As we headed towards the coast, things got calmer. My little flapping episodes grew rarer, and smaller in magnitude. We made a turn, and headed up the coast. The wind was now largely behind us, and so we covered ground quite a rate. Turning around at the northernmost point of our trip, the wind reminded me that it was there by making my turn a little more entertaining than it would have been previously, but by now I'd got the hang of things and wasn't going to let it get the better of me. And then as we continued to turn, we had a headwind. Whilst we'd previously had the wind on our tail, we were flying straight into it.
Our ground speed no longer looked impressive; the scenery was changing much slower than previously. Below us, we were being overtaken by cars. We passed a local airfield that's popular with microlights, to discover that they'd all had the sense to stay at home.
The leg back to the airport was much the same as the leg out; a combination of wind and pockets of warm air conspired to unsettle me at intervals, but I soon saw the familiar sight of the control tower, and before I knew it we were back down.
Lesson two done and dusted, I arrived back at the flying school office to do the hard part (the bit that involves parting with money), to find them discussing whether or not to cancel the rest of the day's lessons due to the weather. Oh boy.
