Length: 26.1 hours

Here's a quick review of the first twenty-six hours of flying time. During these lessons, I was out of town during the weekdays, so my available flight time was drastically reduced.
The first few lessons included the four basic maneuvers: turns, descents, ascents, straight & level flying. These are the fundamentals of flight, non-physically speaking.
Although these are really simple maneuvers, but it starts to build confidence in the aircraft. At first, I didn't know how much bank the airplane could withstand without the wings falling off.
There are two main confidence builders in flight: theory and practice. You could read textbooks that claim as long as the airplane is kept within maneuvering speed (Va), it will stall before structural damage occurs. You can read that along with stall speeds in various configurations per angle of bank, but that only gives the pilot partial confidence in the airplane. The maneuvers need to be executed in order to actually feel how they affect the body and airplane together.
That was what I took out of my first few lessons. The paradigm shift occurs when you realize that the plane 'wants' to stay in the air. As long as airspeed is above a certain point, it is quite difficult to stall and subsequently lose control of the airplane. After learning this, the next step is learning to use the four fundamentals accurately.
After about nine hours and eight lessons, we started to focus on landings. I had been landing the airplane each lesson, but there was a good amount of oversight. We started to stay in the pattern and execute some touch and goes. Touch and goes are when you land, but don't slow down to a halt. Instead, you configure the airplane for takeoff and increase speed until you can takeoff again.
I spent the vast majority of my time from six hours to eighteen hours doing these. At sixteen hours, I was allowed my first supervised solo. This is when the instructor believes that I could handle takeoffs and landings sufficiently. It always seems to be a surprise for people because you never know when the weather will work out just right. But midway through my thirteenth lesson, I was asked to make a full stop halfway through my lesson.
This was my first solo. The nerves really start to show for that first few seconds after the instructor left the airplane. I was told that the airplane would handle differently with the reduction of weight. The plane sped up much quicker and it had much more lift than before. I had to compensate for this by reducing my speed and maintaining altitude sooner than I had been to date. There was much going on around me as well. There were at least three other planes in the pattern at this time, so I had to maintain my separation as well as fly the plane.
After my first landing, I felt confident again. Once you realize that there's nobody else there to help you if something goes wrong, you just have to keep scanning the sky and instruments to make sure everything looks good. For some reason, thinking that kept me calm for the rest of my three touch and goes.
After my first solo, the weather started to turn for the worse. My next lesson included high winds. They were so fast that we reached 60 kts before the first taxi way. This is about 25%-30% of the standard distance required.
While airborne, we executed some slow flight maneuvors. With the high winds, we were able to fly in reverse and still maintain control of the airplane.
After this lesson, the weather turned for the worse. During the start of 2009, there were some unforeseen expenses with the dog, so this caused a few months delay while I rebounded from the financial drain.
After getting back in the game, we flew a few more hours of dual touch and goes before allowing me to fly my second and third supervised solos.
At this point I started to do some of the more interesting flying, so I kept a flight-by-flight log. Hopefully it'll help you get the feel for the process of securing a private pilot certificate. And maybe it'll give you the confidence to be a passenger of mine in the future :)
Ginkgo4J
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