Unbelievable BFR

This week started out simply enough.  I'll be traveling again soon, and I had been busy getting all set for another venture up in Canada.  I had toyed with the idea of getting some flying in, but didn't think I'd have the time or good weather for it.  Once again, my understanding wife supports me and says, "You should go flying." 

Say no more.

The complicating factor is that I'm not current - I need to do a biennial flight review (BFR) to be legal to fly as PIC.  Granted, this doesn't keep me from flying with any old instructor, but it was a good opportunity to get it out of the way.  As before, I wanted to return to my original flight school and the Diamond DA-20, and I'm very glad I did.  Embarrassingly, I had only 8 hours of flying time to show for my last two years, and I somewhat inauspiciously now have two BFRs on the same logbook page.  So it goes...

I called the day before to get it scheduled, and drove over through a few rain showers to get to the airport under a very light overcast and calm winds.  It would  be a nice day as long as we could get the flying in before the afternoon's forecast thunderstorms rolled in.

We spent an hour going over the ground review, covering the airplane, pilot, and flying environment.  This means the things that make an airplane legal for flight - airworthiness, inspections, repairs, required systems, and inoperative equipment - along with the pilot's certification and fitness.  The "environment" is pretty much everything else - airspace review, flight planning, chart interpretation, weather, traffic patterns, ATC, and briefing resources.  The instructor had never heard of my favorite: http://maps.avnwx.com.  So we both learned some new stuff.

I preflighted the plane while we waited for fuel.  I was back in the routine and could do almost the whole thing without the checklist - using it as a post check rather than a to-do list - just the way it's meant to be.  The flight school also had a few new procedures to review - they now require a SPOT GPS receiver in their planes, along with new callsigns for the local airport.  And they now chock and gust lock the planes when parked - for some reason we never bothered before.

Now came the best part - flying!  Everything came back (if it was ever gone) once I was settled in the cockpit.  It's as much a testament to my original instructor as anything else, but I was glad that I didn't fumble too much.   We started with a few touch and gos, then hopped over to the practice area.  I was on the radio and quicker on the calls than I think the instructor was guessing I would have been given the length of time since my last flights.  Even better, after the steep turns and stalls, he couldn't believe I hadn't been flying or studying for the past several months.  That's a great confidence booster, even if I still plan on flying with an instructor for the next few hours - especially if I'm in a different airplane again.

Of course, everyone's mileage may vary, but for me it has been very helpful to keep my head in the flying game even if I'm not actually sitting in the cockpit.  Even flying commercial airlines allows me to think about what's going on up in front, and watch the airport environment as we taxi in and out of the terminal.  I can plan flights I'll never take, check weather briefings every once in a while, and keep up with current events through AOPA and EAA.  Contrary to expectations, I don't spend much time with Microsoft Flight Simulator.  I toy around with it from time to time, but don't use it for any particular training purposes.  I'm worried it might teach me bad habits - and anyway, there's no physical sensation attached to it, so it doesn't help with coordinating turns or looking outside the plane at other real traffic.