It’s all about preparation

This morning I decided that I was going to get up a bit earlier than I have been to give myself more time in all areas of preflight – which of course started with a nice homemade latte for the drive to the airport.

While on route, I turned the radio to a
nice channel and just chilled out thinking about the flight lesson objectives, which seem to be a review today but hopefully more time on landings!

Arriving at the airport about 1.25 hrs before our departure time, I was able to pull out an older airworthiness checklist for the plane we are flying today and completed a new one using the old one as reference. Then a few minutes entering our flight plan details and doing a quick check of metars and weather conditions for our route. After I am fairly comfortable with the conditions I call up the weather briefer to confirm and hear any notams – which today there are a couple interesting ones, parachute jumpers out of Eloy and an unmanned aircraft over a region to the west of where we will be going.

With all the preflight planning done it’s time to checkout the plane by doing a through walk around inspection, which I have learned to modify slightly for a slightly more logical progression. Once preflight was complete I then had almost 30 mins to get myself collected, review today’s lesson and review maneuver checklists with some chair flying.