Dual Enrollment and First Passenger

Wow this was a busy week! Unfortunately on Thursday it was too windy to go up. But, we still managed to make use of our time - we ended up doing all the necessary paperwork to enroll me in both my Commercial and Instrument rating simultaneously and covered the first couple sections of material. On Friday, we made really good use of the day. I'm not sure if I mentioned, but I changed my schedule of lessons so that I now have double blocks on Thursday and Friday only. Still have 4 scheduled lessons per week, but now I have Saturdays off. On Friday we went up right away and flew to Plymouth, landed, and for the second lesson we flew back up to Norwood with an hour of instruction between each take off and landing. My instructor told me that I did everything very well for being the first two times of flying by instruments only. It was still rather gusty, bumpy, and choppy with the turbulence that was out there. But, I still managed to hold all of my maneuvers within Practical Test Standards. We were done with 2 hours of flight by reference to instruments only by 130. We came back into Horizon Aviation in Norwood and completed the ground lesson on the instrument systems as I need to learn how all of the instruments actually work. The way we are going to cover the material moving forward is basically doubling everything up per lesson that I have. Unless of course I need to slow down to absorb the material. But, if all goes well I should be able to cover my instrument rating fairly quickly, while simultaneously working on my Commercial license.

So after the 2 hours of lessons and an hour of ground work, I waited for my first victim to show up......my brother, Nate. Nate showed up, but we had to wait while Ken, the manager of Horizon Aviation Norwood, and Radek, the Chief Flight Instructor were up in the plane we were to take for my first passenger flight. We ended up going up about half hour later than we expected, but it was a great flight! We headed up just as the sun was setting and with what little sunlight was left, Nate was able to snap a few decent shots of the setting sun and the surrounding area. He even managed to take a couple videos - one of our take-off from KOWD and one of our landing at KOWD. I had left the dash lights on during our descent and landing at Norwood, which I normally wouldn't do, but left them on so Nate could see what he was doing while he was taping the approach. It was pretty funny when Nate told me he had no idea where were landing as we kept getting lower and lower until we made our turn from base to final approach into Norwood Memorial Airport. Mind you - it was a little windy on Saturday. Landing with a direct 11 knot crosswind with gusts up to 19 knots was a little tricky.
Link to Pictures