First Plane Ride

Last Christmas, my wife bought me a ticket for a "Discovery Flight" from Midwest Aviation. This business is located next to the Barkley Regional Airport just west of Paducah. Midwest offers aviation services to the area out of Barkley.

This Discovery Flight was, IMO, cheaply priced at a mere $75 for about a 30 minute plane ride. My 10 year old son and I took our plane ride yesterday. Of course, this plane ride was everything my son talked about for a couple of days beforehand.

We arrived at the airport 10 minutes before our scheduled time. We found the front desk easily using the directions I was given to navigate the building. I handed the ticket to the young lady at the desk and she said I could wait on the couch for a few minutes. A gentleman, probably in his early 20's quickly arrived and introduced hisself. He asked me if I had any interest in flight lessons. The Discovery Flights are intended to give people a first hand introduction to flight which might lead into flight lessons.

After talking briefly about my interest in flight lessons, we headed out to the aircraft. I don't have specs about the aircraft but it was a small, 4 seater 2005 Cessna. He told us how to get in, buckle up and be careful what we touched. I sat in THE pilot's seat and my son sat in the back seat.

To my suprise there were only 3 round gauges on the dash. The rest of the info was on two large Garmin displays. They had tons and tons of information in them. The information I saw had air speed, ground speed in knotts, altitude above sea level, engine RPM, lots of information about the aircrafts direction and such. The other Garmin display had typical map info that was geared toward pilot needs. It even displayed all towers that held radio, tv antennas and such and it had their height. I believe water towers were even displayed.

Before we took off the flight instructor asked if we had any particular direction we wanted to go. I told him what part of town I lived in but if we had enough time I thought we could fly up to Vienna, Illinois. This is where I was raised and my mom and step-dad still live. He said that should be ok. By car this drive is about 30 minutes.

Things I noticed during our ride were

1. the instructor used the pedals to steer the plane on the ground
2. the instructor let me pull the plane off the ground when we hit the proper speed
3. after he got the plane pointed in the proper direction he turned on the auto-pilot
4. we got up to about 2,500 feet and cruised at about 115 knots
5. when we arrived at Vienna we circled my mom's house and turned back toward Paducah
6. our trip took about 10 minutes to get there and 10 minutes back
7. the entire time you could see from Paducah to Vienna if you recognized tall larndmarks

During the flight I talked with the instructor. He told me he was from Kansas and had taken all his flight lessons quickly using a loan. His degree was in some variety of aeronautics. He has been in Paducah since August (about 3 months). My flight at 11am was then 4th flight he had already done that day and he had a total of 8 scheduled this weekend. Wow!

When I was talking with the instructor and another person at the airport, I found out it's not out of the ordinary for someone to take flight lessons over a long period of time. One person he mentioned had been taking lessons for 5 years. The lessons are about $170 each and this covers $140 for the plane and $30 for the instructor. Personally, I thought the $30 / hour for the flight instructor was pretty cheap.

My son didn't say a whole lot after the flight but he really wanted me to take those flight lessons and take him with me. I figure when he talks to his grandparents this coming week he'll have a lot to say about his first plane ride. I told him about how important it was for him to do well in science and math because those were very important when flying planes.