Cleared for Takeoff

At the beginning of the summer after my freshman year of college, I was excited - excited to see my friends, excited to make some more money working at a local restaurant, and excited for all that summer in the beautiful city of Chicago brings. Those plans all changed when I dislocated my thumb tossing the football around with my good friends Nick and Kevin, and I was put in a cast for six weeks.

Initially I had thought about waiting on my flight training since my summer was more or less booked with working, working out, taking a summer class, and relaxing with my pals. Since the cast was around for those six weeks, I was unable to work and could only work out one side of my upper body. It was also a huge, smelly, bulky pain to have around and I couldn't wait for it to come off. I spent most of the rest of the time with my cast on doing various odd jobs for some family friends to make a buck here and there, but it didn't compare to the steady, albeit minimum wage, income that the restaurant job would have provided.

Once the cast was off, I had to wait two weeks to be cleared by a doctor, then there would be another week or two for me to get any work in at the restaurant before leaving for school. I decided taking the time to adapt to working there again and re-learning the menu and protocols wasn't necessarily worth doing for two weeks, not to mention just getting back on the schedule to work again.. Instead, I thought that I could spend some time working on my dream of flying instead.

While I was back at school in the spring, I had looked into various flight schools in my area and the one that caught my eye was at the Clow International Airport in Bolingbrook, IL - about a 20-25 minute drive from my house. On Sunday, July 20, I called them up and they said they could accommodate me later that day for an intro flight.

Not to sound corny, but the flight was everything I had expected. The weather was perfect - winds no more than 5 knots, scattered high-level clouds, and I didn't do as bad of a job landing and taking off as I thought I might for my first flight.

After the intro flight, I decided to set a goal for myself of flying solo before I left for school. All of the initial training flights went relatively smoothly and quickly. After eight flights and five days of flying twice a day, my instructor threw me into my first solo, and I was totally blindsided by it - and I mean blindsided in the nicest sense of the word.

In reality, I had sufficient preparation and I was ready, I was just shocked at the way it all went down.

Check back for how my first solo went in the next post!