Omnipot

Days have passed since I passed my checkride, but I never got my Private Pilot's Licence in my post.

Why does it take so long? I graduated last November, and my temporary licence has already been expired. I can't even apply for my Japanese licence until I get a real FAA licence.

So I called my examiner Mr.Bennie in the U.S., and asked what's going on with FAA. He said he'll take care of it, so I just have to wait.

And finally the international mail came to me in April 23rd. I saw the issued date. It was obviously after the day I called Mr.Bennie. Now I doubt that FAA has been forgetting about me for more than five months.

But once it's mine, everything is alright. I'm very happy about this.

"You got it? Hm, it's no fun." said Toshi, who also came back to Japan recently. Yes, he's got a highest ATP license so he's making fun of me getting lowest PPL.

On Apr.30th, Mr.Yano took me to Honda Airport Festival in Okegawa city.

I've heard of this festival but this was the first time I went. There were lots of small aircrafts. Honda is not only making cars and motorcycles, but also putting lots of efforts in aviation too.

Besides fire fiting aircrafts, motor paragliders, I saw R22 doing acrobat, as well as Cessna 172 doing formation flight, which is uncommon in Japan. I also had my first experience in a helicopter too. The model was AS350B by Aérospatiale.

Long ago, I saw boys with reflex camera shooting pictures of aircrafts and thought how strange they were. But now I'm doing the same thing.

Written May.6 2007 Naoko

I got severe cold and couldn't go anywhere but stayed in the bed during vacation week. Wasn't only me, my colleague and even Toshi was getting cold too.
Maybe I was responsible for vast infection, but who knows.

Still, it's something quite odd that Toshi, who used to be my flight instructor, has been moving into my apartment, staying with me.

Because of this, I still feel like I'm in Ardmore. Everytime I imagine him saying "Naoko, do preflight check", but this is Tokyo and there's no runway.

He asked me to design a website for him, so I did, and it's called "Propelians". I don't know what's going on but anyway he wants to make a flight club in Japan.

After I got well, I visited Tsukuba again for hang gliding.
But I couldn't wake up in the morning and missed the train.

So I took my motorcycle.

Tsukuba is about 150km distance from my place, and after expressway, the scenery changes into country side. Maybe this is the right place for motorcycle touring.

In the area, Mr.Katsura took me to the first tandem flight in the morning. The air was great, the big wing caught nice thermal and we climed up the sky. Dropping a little shadow of the glider onto the people in the top of the mountains, I thought "I must be in the center of the sun. How would I look like?".

I asked Mr.Katsura how high we're flying. He said it's about 750m above the ground. Means it's about 2500ft. How could a man fly like a bird as the same elevation as Cessna aircraft. It was amazing.

Written Jun.17 2007 Naoko

In June, I didn't go anywhere at all, staying in the house writing bunch of HTML codes for Toshi, but it's alright.

Toshi invited many of his ex-student to Tokyo and held a big party for his club, Propelians. It's supposed to be a flight club, but we don't have our own aircraft yet. (It's really expensive in Japan)

11 people gathered and we had fun time remembering the days in Ardmore. We had lots of unusual, thrilling episodes to laugh about.

There were some people who hasn't started training yet, and for those people, all the extreme stories seem to be exciting, ending up making all the people want to go to Ardmore.

The difficulty of flight training is not because it's challenging. The most important is always the basic things, like human relationships and good communications. Ardmore itself is no good nor bad, it depends on one's mind.

It was fun party, and I hope that everyone would have a great experience.

Written Jul.15 2007 Naoko