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My interest in flight has been hit and miss throughout the years. With college, marriage, raising a child, and everything in between, my interest in flying wound up in the back seat. After initially getting prices at a local flight school back in my teens, I walked away only because of the financial expense. With the growth of the internet, I once again began to inquire about flying lessons via local websites but I didn't actually take the initiative to follow through with it. I would not return to an airport with flight lessons in mind until recently. Nearly twenty years after my initial inquiry at the Scranton / Wilkes-Barre Airport (the locals call it the Avoca Airport) I stopped at an airport within a 20 minute drive from my home. A small privately owned and operated airport nestled in the countryside was there all along and I hadn't even known about it. It was there, after a general briefing and a pretty convincing sales pitch by the airport's owner, I decided to finally follow and conquer this challenge.
I will document the entire journey from my first flight... yes flight number 1... beginning with the first time I set foot inside a Cessna single prop plane, through the learning process on my way to a private pilot certificate. I knew from the moment we began to accelerate down the runway on my initial flight that this was going to happen one way or another.
My background was never one with planes and airports. My commercial flights over my lifetime number less than 20 total. So my interest in flying comes from a combination of the challenge, experiencing the tremendous views, and the pure excitement of all that space between the ground and the plane. On my initial flight, my flight instructor took me directly over my home. It is a picture I'll never forget, and actually it's a feeling I'll never forget including my return home. I momentarily stood in my driveway and looked up at the sky knowing I just flew overhead about 1200 feet above only a few minutes earlier.
I anxiously awaited my next trip to the sky and my next step in achieving my private pilot's certificate. Most people refer to it as a pilot's license, I still catch myself calling it that as well.
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This site: Flight Number 1 is a chronicle of my steps toward my FAA checkride and my private pilot certificate. My plan is to summarize each flight lesson in one page or less so others may gain some insight on the entire learning process right from the beginning. I'll do my best to describe each lesson in detail. Remember, I'm starting from scratch. There are no pilots in my family, nor do I have any close friends who are pilots, and my first time flying in a single engine prop driven airplane has only been recently. At this time I am a novice and learning bits and pieces as I go. You can skip right to my latest lesson or you can start from the very beginning.
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