Pilot's logbook

7/15 Planned to fly with Zach after I took Frank to the airport. I checked the weather--METARs, TAFs, some regular sites, and knew that the wind was 13 kt gusting to 18 or 25, so there wouldn't be any soloing even if I did get my act together.

I asked Zach about wind-shear, and whether immediately adding power (full power?) would be the right thing to do under that circumstance, and he said yes, that's why we keep one hand on the throttle.

When I got there, Zach said go ahead and preflight, but come back to check the weather. When I did, he showed me a line of storms developing on radar that would be on us in about a half an hour. They hadn't been there when I first came, which was why I hadn't seem them before I left the house. I called the weather briefer WXBRIEF, and it was really interesting that HE didn't know anything about those storms either. He was talking about the stuff that was brewing up north, but didn't have a clue about the stuff in the west, and when I told him that was what we were looking at, he didn't have anything to say about it. Zach pointed out that we might have been able to do a few touch-and-go's here at the airport, but the big issues was that we would be out somewhere when the weather came in, and we wouldn't be able to land back at Bowman Field, and would have to go to some other airport.

Zach's routine with getting weather is:
*Check weather radar first.
*then NOAA.gov --> standard briefing.

TAF's are updated at 6, 12, 18 & 24 Zulu, with "AMD" amended updates when required by conditions.

*Weather.com takes your home zipcode.

*Watch the weather channel. Duh. Can you believe that this past week I've been telling myself I should watch the TV weather, and trying to make myself remember to turn on the TV at 10:30pm to catch it, and it never ONCE occurred to me that WE HAVE THE WEATHER CHANNEL ON CABLE TV ALL DAY LONG. Old dogs and new tricks.

At any rate, we didn't fly today. I bought a plotter, had a nice talk with Lisa (where I might have talked too much), went to meet Beth & Juan and Alex and Ben at the mall (playground ship, bookstore, pizza & potato soup & iphone, bought $20 worth of dead-sea-salt hand soap and conversation from a young man from Israel peddling his miracles at the Mall, sat in the Panera parkinglot and alternately highlighted Gleim pages and took catnaps, delivered bread to Wayside Mission, and came back home. Frank is in North Carolina for three days. He's having a good time.

And, I have this big honking hole that won't fill. Channel it, channel it, channel it. Fly the plane.