Dec 17th 2007 12:17 am Second pair of students solo…
Last week my other 2 student finally got some good weather and where able to solo. The first one was completely uneventful. The second one was a little bit more tense.
The weather in the morning was complete crap. 200 overcast and about 1/4 vis. Fog was thick and NOTHING was leaving or coming in. But by about 12 it had burned off. So we go up and I do 3 turns in the pattern with him and then bring the plane back to the ramp, engine still running and ask him “So you think your ready to solo?” and of course he said “Yes!” So I gave him the whole speech about how the plane is going to climb much faster because my fat 215 pounds are gone, that he is to do 3 landings to a full stop with a taxi back, and that he is to tell the ground controller that he is a student pilot and this is his first solo. So I hop out and let him go.
I then run inside and grab my walkie-talkie so I can listen in on him talking to ground and tower. By the time I run back out to the ramp he is already taxiing to the run up area. He gets out there, does a run up and then lines up behind another Cessna, and he is #3 in line. He finally gets cleared for take-off and comes around with a nice landing. He then taxis back to the runway and is about #4 in line, and the planes lined up keep building. There are about 8 planes lined up. Manassas has parallel runways though and the other runway is not getting much use.
So my student is finally #1 in line and the tower tells him to taxi over the runway, and taxi to and hold short of the parallel runway. I start to freak out. He has only used the parallel runway once. All of his visual cues change, the runway is much longer, and has IFR traffic coming in on approach. I couldn’t believe the tower had a student pilot on his first solo change runways. We where all a little worried that he would make left traffic like the other runway and forget that the other runway was right traffic. Well he figured it out and did extremely well and I was pretty impressed on how he handled it all.
Afterwards I realized that the tower probably put him on the other runway with less traffic because of that fact, that it was less busy and they could keep tabs on him much easier.
Posted by v1valarob / Being a CFI...