Not sure where the last of winter went as far as flying goes. As soon as the first indication of nice weather comes it seems the evening and weekends go towards working outside in the yard and other things around the house. However, living close to a major training airport does not put flying out of my mind for too long.

Read all about my struggles on what my next training endeavor will be after the jump.

I finally began some commercial training the past couple of weeks as part of a 10 hour insurance requirement to get checked out in a rental Arrow available here locally. One of the local FBOs has a nice 2002 Piper Arrow that handles really nice (if you discount the nose heavy nature of any Arrow). It is a nice change from the super old turbo arrow they use to rent. It has a nice Garmin panel and also has A/C which has been great for those hot Kansas City summer days!

My checkout/commercial introduction began with my CFI showing me some of the commercial maneuvers. He indicated the commercial maneuvers are something you can practice without an instructor and just get help fine tuning things once you have the basics down. The commercial is a lot of the same maneuvers as the private, with much more accuracy required.

Anytime I fly a retract (formally known as a complex airplane) I have to make myself think about the gear. My Private CFI once said “…there are two types of pilots that fly complex airplanes; those that have landed gear up and those that will.” I really don’t want to be an NTSB stat anytime soon so I got a kick out of this when my commercial CFI shared this “complex airplane” variation of the GUMPS acronym used in flying complex airplanes:
G – Get the gear down!
U – Understand you need the gear down!
M – Must get the gear down!
P – Please put the gear down!
S – Still have the gear down!?!

With the 10 hour met and an intro to all the commercial stuff, I felt ready for my written the FBO put together. It was a take home and I passed with no problems. Now let’s see if this plane gets us back to Iowa a little quicker than the Cessna 172 does…