1st Time I have wanted to kiss the Ground when I got back....

 So I went for my first solo flight COMPLETELY by my self.
 No instructor waiting at the office, no dad watching..nothing.
  Suffice it to say, I was nervous.

 The weather was marginal. It was Great for a January day, but still not perfect Visual flight rules weather.
  I had taken some time off of work, so that I could take advantage of this nice day. I was feeling kind of rushed because I needed to hurry back to work. That stress, combined with being nervous made for bad mental status for flying.

 After completing my interior and exterior pre-flight checklists, I got in the plane and started her up. Part of the Run-up portion of the pre-flight checklists, is checking the weather as well. Upon doing this, I realized the weather had deteriorated below what I was checked off to fly in. Or so I thought. The weather that I was checking was actually the weather at the Hillsboro Airport. Which only reports on weather inside the airspace that the airport resides in. I was outside of that airspace. Meaning that I only had to check the weather at the airport, or airspace that I was going to. Because I believed the weather was below what I was able to fly in, I decided to go back to park the airplane, check the weather one last time, and call my instructor before calling it quits. I re-installed all of the control locks and "remove before Flight" banners, and went back up to the office to make a final decision. The owner of the planes was actually in the office, informed me of my mistake regarding the weather and said that I could fly.

Realizing that I could fly, I went back down to the airplane, and hopped in, and started her back up. I was thinking at the time that since I had already done a pre-flight check, that It was not important to do another one. So I removed the control lock from the yoke, and proceeded to the run-up area again. After doing a short run-up of the engine, checking my gauges, and setting my instruments, I pulled out on the runway and started the roll.

 As you are rolling down the runway, the pilot is supposed to verify that the instruments are reading correctly. The two most important are the airspeed indicator, and the engine instruments ( oil temp, pressure etc..)
 So I checked those two instruments on the take off roll, and noticed that my airspeed indicator was not reading correctly. I looked over, and checked the engine instruments and they seemed to be normal.  I wanted to abort the takeoff, but I looked forward and there was not enough runway left for me to safely stop.
  The only thing I could do, was get the airplane airborne and pray that it was only the instrument malfunctioning. While I was trying to take in all of the information being presented to me, and make a decision, I completely missed the "remove before flight" banner and cover over the pitot tube that I had reinstalled when I went back up to the office.

   After I was airborne I tried to assess the situation so that I could decide what the best action to take would be. Seeing that "remove before flight" tag flapping in the wind, and hearing it was very nerve wracking. I made the decision to continue around the pattern, and land the plane.

          The pitot tube is a device that gathers information for the instruments to decipher and display. In this case, having the pitot tube covered prevented my airspeed indicator from reading correctly. The airspeed indicator is a vital instrument to even a visual flight, because you need to be able to control your speed in different phases of flight. If you are in the landing phase of flight, and your airspeed indicator is not reading properly, you could believe that you are going a different speed than you really are. In this case, I knew ahead of time that the airspeed indicator was not reading properly. Not being able to trust that instrument, meant that I had to feel the air on the airplane, and leave myself a little bit of room for error. If I got to slow in the pattern, I could stall the airplane and crash. This could happen also on landing. I could get to slow, and essentially fall out of the sky before I am ready to come down.

Well back to the actual flying, now that you know a little bit of information, to help you understand the situation.
Making the radio calls in the pattern, and getting back to the airport proved to be a tough task because I was getting nervous about not knowing how fast I was going. There was only one way to get back.. And that was DOWN. Taking a big breath, I started making the decent into the runway. Trying to make sure that I was not going to slow, I stayed high so that I had plenty of room to get slowed down, but recover if I had stalled.



 After flying for what seemed like hours, I was on final. And I was way to high. Just a few weeks ago, Forest, my flight instructor, showed me a good method to get down, quickly and be safe. So employing his method, I dropped all of the flaps, and aimed her down. I got nervous the farther down I got towards the runway because I realized I was going to fast. But It all worked out, because when I leveled out just a few feet above the runway, the speed bled away. The problem became worse however, because I was using up a lot of the runway trying to bleed off that speed. I had been told before by flight instructors, that if I wasn't down by the windsock, to just go around and try again.  But this seemed like an emergency situation for me.Going around, with out knowing how fast you are going could be even worse than just pushing into the ground and slamming on the brakes.

After just  passing the wind sock, the plane finally settled down, and sat right down on the runway. With only 500 feet left of runway, I hit the breaks and pulled off the runway, shut down the engine and pulled off the cover that had caused this whole mess.

  To add insult to injury, when I got out of the plane to remove the pitot tube cover, I smelled fuel. I thought to myself, Good gracious, what else could go wrong today. After a little inspection, I found fuel leaking from the seem in front of the flaps on the wing.

After all I had gone through, I decided to take the airplane back, park it and call it a day. I went back up to the office, and explained the malfunctions to the owner.


Even though it ended well, I was reminded of how lucky I truly was. This could have ended up so much worse. Many people have flown with block pitot tubes, and not had it end so well. I felt truly blessed.

I learned a few lessons on this flight .A few lessons that I won't soon forget.