pilot

I flew a plane this morning. A Cessna Skyhawk. Don't tell anyone though, I'm pretty sure I wasn't exactly supposed to... It wasn't a lesson, just went along with someone with a pilot's licence who decided to put his fate in my hands once we were in the air. I thought I was just coming along for a ride. I was wrong.

This morning I found myself steering the little aircraft (the first non-commercial aircraft I've ever been in) around Redcliffe Aerodrome towards the runway - after a quick five minute rundown on how it worked, I got told to steer the damn thing. After almost wetting myself when I headed away from the bitumen, I got the hang of it and got us to the runway. Once we took off, I got a quick overview of the countless buttons, switches, levers, dials and displays in front of me and got told what altitude to be at and which direction to go in, and then got told to fly the damn thing. It actually wasn't very hard at all. Wasn't quite like driving a car though, I'll tell you that now.

Heights aren't really my thing, but it was ok because I didn't really get the chance to worry about it, I was too busy trying to make sure that we weren't too high or too low, and heading in the right direction, as well as looking out for other aircraft around and dodging the clouds. I had my camera with me but was also too preoccupied to take many photos. Whenever I did get the chance to gaze out, I found the view to be awesome. It wasn't like when you're on a passenger jet with a window seat and have this little hole to gaze out of. You had this big open view of everything.

After a touch and go at Caboolture (I obviously had nothing to do with that, I handed the controls back over) we flew towards the Glasshouse Mountains and this was when I started to feel a little nauseous. There was a bit of a wind coming in from the south, and that coupled with the bits of turbulence from the wind coming off and around the mountains when we got near them (damn you Reynold's number...). Managed to survive though - I think that by concentrating on keeping the plane heading in the right direction helped me forget about the possibility of being sick. Not to mention making sure I didn't fly into the mountains...

Anyway it was an awesome experience. Not sure if I'm keen to get back into that cramped cockpit and thrown around anytime soon though. I went straight to bed when I got home, had a killer headache. Not having much sleep the night before probably didn't help either. I need to harden up a bit, really don't feel like throwing up everywhere... Though all I had for breakfast was a muesli bar, so it's not like there was much that could've come back up.