My 1st Solo Flight

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I am 
Working for an Aviation Internship
For My Live Project
My 1st Solo Flight 
I am Collecting following Data from 
all Civil Pilots
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My 1st Solo Flight
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There’s a Big Difference between 

a Pilot and an Aviator. 

One is a Technician, 

the other is an Artist 

in Love with Flight

A Story of a Pilot On his 1st Solo day 

I was my instructor’s first student. He was a good young pilot, but he’d never taught anyone to fly before. During takeoffs and landings, he’d constantly be correcting small errors, asking me questions, and generally overloading my ability to focus.

That could have been a clever teaching technique if he only did it once in a while, but it was pretty constant in high workload (for a pre-solo pilot) situations.

Without him in the plane, I was mildly nervous, but I had an incredible number of spare brain cycles available in the pattern, that previously were being used to respond to corrections, questions, and comments!

The mild nervousness combined with the decreased workload really is what it was “like” at least in my memory. The question wasn’t “What happened on your first solo?”, which I could tell a couple of mildly interesting anecdotes about. 

My sense is that when people think of a first solo (either in the future or the past), they are thinking of the emotions that accompany piloting a plane alone for the first time.

That said, anecdotes from first solo:

Instructor tried to kill me: I was in a C-152 and we had just done a couple of landings. 

My CFI had me taxi over to the tower, and as he was getting out pointed out that everything was all set for takeoff, so I could just taxi to the runway and fly the pattern. He was wrong about that, since he had leaned the mixture way back without telling me. Fortunately, I was never going to takeoff without running my own pre-takeoff checklist, and I moved the mixture to rich. I think he realized the error during my takeoff roll and the tower called to tell my CFI said to push in the mixture…

Forgot to retract flaps to takeoff position: After my first circuit, on my touch and go I took off with full flaps. Since I was in a C152 on a 7000 foot runway, this wasn’t a big problem, but I didn’t figure out why I was climbing so sluggishly until turning cross.

On my second circuit (the one that started with full flaps), the wind shifted and the tower flipped the direction of landing on the runway that was being used. This was a very unusual wind direction for the airport and I’d never landed in that direction (both directions on the other runway happened fairly often, but not on the 7000′ runway). 

Plus, I needed to be in the pattern going the other way. The tower gave me various directions to accomplish this, but also kept pointing out landmarks I didn’t know for this reverse pattern. I probably replied “unfamiliar” about 5 times.

You can tell from those stories that I was at a busy towered airport for my training. It took a lot longer to be comfortable flying, since the communications were complex and lots of time was spent holding on the ground for other traffic, but when I was done I was comfortable flying into pretty much any airport/airspace.