Learning to Fly: Starting My PPL

I've wanted to fly for years. This month I stopped wanting and booked a lesson.

May 3rd: first flight, first takeoff, hands on the controls with the instructor following through beside me.

I'm writing this less than 24 hours later and my hands still remember the airplane wanting to lift the moment I eased back on the yoke.

Why a PPL

I like building things I can operate end to end. Code I wrote. Songs I produced. A game about my hometown. A plane is the next one, except the consequences of a bad assumption are considerably louder.

Software forgives. You can crash a process and ship a fix in five minutes, and most of my professional instincts are shaped by that fact. An aircraft enforces discipline through physics instead of code review. I wanted a hobby where I can't talk my way through the parts I haven't learned yet.

It also sits on top of a pile of things I already care about: physical skill, checklists, instruments, weather, energy management, decisions under time pressure. Engineering you wear.

The first flight

Pre-flight took much longer than I expected. Control surfaces, fuel sample, oil, fuselage, propeller, lights - the instructor walked me through all of it. No single check is difficult. The whole discipline is that you don't skip them, and I could already feel how easy skipping would be once it stops being novel.

Then in. Headset on. He handled the radios while I listened and tried to keep up with what was being said, which was maybe forty percent successful.

Takeoff was the part I'd been turning over for weeks. He talked me through it - full power, eyes down the runway, light back-pressure when he called for it. The nose comes up before the wheels leave. Then it goes quiet, and then you're climbing.

It's loud and bumpy and very bright. And then somewhere just after rotation there's a second where the ground stops being under you and you're balancing on air. I'd pay for the whole license again for that second, which is fortunate, because I'm about to.

What surprised me

I'd assumed the hard part would be cognitive - procedures, radio, airspace. The hard part was physical. Keeping the wings level, the nose where it belongs, and the ball centered, all simultaneously, while also being a person who is thinking about things.

Trim does far more than I understood from reading about it. It's a small wheel that takes the load off the yoke, and the difference between trimmed and untrimmed is the difference between flying the airplane and wrestling it.

And the real lesson of the hour was where to look. I kept catching myself on the instruments, and the instructor kept quietly pulling my eyes back outside. Everything I was trying to find on the panel was available out of the windscreen, faster and more accurately, if I'd just look at it.

The plan, such as it is

I'm after the skill more than the certificate, though I recognize that's an easy thing to say at hour one.

A PPL is roughly 45 flight hours plus theory exams, a medical, and a checkride. I'll go at whatever pace my schedule and budget allow - probably six to nine months, probably longer, and I say that fully aware that everyone says that.

The loop is the fun part and it's the same loop as everything else I've gotten decent at: book a lesson, fly something specific - slow flight, stalls, patterns, crosswind landings - debrief honestly, read, repeat.

Next milestones, roughly: first solo, first cross-country, checkride. Maybe a night rating eventually. No timeline attached to any of it.

If you fly, or you're thinking about starting, I'd like to hear how you went about it: me@eone.work