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N13329, originally uploaded by 5igmund.

What a beautiful day!  I had my first lesson today and it was everything I thought it would be and more.  I met up with my Flight Instructor Will Outlaw at our flying club hanger around 10:00 to start going through things.  For about an hour and a half we went through the cockpit and did a step by step pre-flight of the aircraft.  From there we did a flight brief and saddled up to go.  The purpose of this flight is pretty much to get up, have fun, and do a bit of work on the four fundamentals of flying, but mostly just to get comfortable with the aircraft.  Will had me taxi the aircraft to the runway which is totally counter to everything we have ever delt with driving vehicles.  This is because steering with your feet is an illegal thing to do in a motor vehicle.  We did a straight out take off from runway 24R and off towards Lake Minnetonka.  What a surreal feeling… We have all been on a big old airliner and have flown before.  Heck, I have even been on some sketchy little Army planes (yes the Army has planes.)  But, this was just something totally different here you are in this little tin can with wings, accelerating down a strip of road that keeps getting shorter and shorter.   Before you know it you are flying over the treetops.  Then I was kind of thinking to myself, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?!  That was only a few seconds though, a few bumps on climb out nothing too bad.  Will did a great job of keeping me relaxed and talking me through the takeoff.  Now that we were actually flying Will wanted me to start getting comfortable with sight pictures and how things should look and feel as we are flying.  We leveled off around 2500 ft and made a big right turn towards Monticello and HWY 94 on this leg I quickly got over the oh shit factor and started to full appreciate what I was doing and was able to start looking around a bit.  More importantly I was able to relax my kung fu grip on the controls.  Will did a little demo about adverse yaw and why the rudder is important for a coordinated turn. Once we got up towards HWY 94 we did a 180 turn south and did some big right and left 360 degree turns, a figure 8 and a few descending and ascending turns.  From here we went back to HWY 94 and followed it back towards KMIC.  Will did some calling into the tower and we maneuvered in for a straight in approach to runway 14L, decreased power to around 2000 RPMs and began our descent into KMIC adding flaps as we approached.  Will let me get a good feel of the more exaggerated controls of slow flight until we got closer to landing.  Once we were a bit out Will took the control of the aircraft and set her down on the runway.  We taxied back to the hanger, went through shutdown procedures and had the fueler come top us off, we finished up our lesson at around 1300.

All in all a great flight, I am still a bit weak in the knees from the adrenaline rush of my first flight!  Tonight Will wanted me to look over the four fundamentals of flight, Normal Take-off’s and Slow flight procedures.  I think I am also going to familiarize my self a bit more with the airport diagram and the Cessna 172 operators manual.  So tomorrow starts another training day!  I can only imagine how exciting this gets if this all was just the first day! So I am looking forward to my wife coming home tonight so I can bore her to death with all of the the details!