It's a bird! It's a plane! No really, it's a big ****ing bird!

Do I have your attention yet?  Good, more on that later!  :-)

So, as someone once said, "...and on the 7th day He rested."  Well, that wasn't the case for me!  I woke up early on Sunday morning for church.  I found a nice little Catholic establishment right by the house so I decided to venture there.  It was church.  Enough said.  

After church, I met my aunt and uncle at a beachfront Cafe.  It was glorious.  The sun was out, the waves were crashing on the beach and I was having breakfast.  You know, for being unemployed and spending enough to buy a REALLY REALLY nice car, this ain't bad.  After breakfast, I head-in to my final multi-engine add-on sim.  What is a multi-engine add-on?  Great question!

There are different levels of pilot certifications.  The most basic one (as far as regular airplanes are concerned) is sport pilot.  It allows you to fly but not venture more than 50 nautical miles from your home airport.  It requires the least amount of hours and is the most stringent.  The next level is private pilot.  When I would fill out my logbook in Montana, I would put the amount of hours under the category of airplane.  There are 4 categories (helicopters need not apply): ASEL, ASES, AMEL, AMES.  The first two are Airplane Single-Engine Land and Single-Engine Sea.  I would fill-out time under ASEL.  If I get a private pilot's license like most people do, it qualifies me to be pilot in command of a single-engine airplane with less than 200 hp.  If you want to fly VFR (visual flight rules) in a multi-engine aircraft (AMEL), you need to take instruction and take a check in a multi-engine aircraft.  The airlines are HUGE on this since you don't see many single engine commercial airplanes flying around.  

I am fully able to just go through my instrument and commercial ratings in a single engine but it would be much much more expensive to get multi-engine add-ons to all of those.  So, I'm doing it all multi-engine.  But I digress.

So, I had my last sim on Sunday.  It went really really well.  He said my procedures were perfect and my checklists were perfect.  That was good because my last flight wasn't nearly as good as I would have liked it to be.

Today, I had another flight.  It was supposed to start at 9 am but because of low clouds, we had to sit around waiting for them to burn off (red roads for flying I guess you could say).  We didn't end up getting in the air until about 1230.  We took off and headed out over the beach again.  We did a bunch of maneuvers which I did well within Practical Test Standards (PTS) or within regulations.  After around 45 minutes total time, we headed back in to "beat-up" the pattern.  And beat-up is a pretty good phrase for it but it wasn't the pattern that was getting beat.  By the time we descended down to around 800 feet, we realized that is was HOTT (yes, hot with two ts).  After a few very good landings, I was sweating.  I'm not talking about the water running down your back sweat or the moist under-arm sweat.  I'm talking about the "dripping off your top lip and tasting the salt" sweat.  And for the hour-plus I was circling the airport, it only got hotter.

So, after one of our take offs, we turn back around to fly parallel to the runway headed back to the landing end (this is called downwind because the wind is pushing us back down the runway--also not why it's called that but easiest to remember it that way).  My instructor kills my engine at about 700 feet above the ground.  In case you were wondering, when an engine dies, even simulated (meaning he just cut the power but it was still running) that close to the ground, it makes your pooper clench up a little.  I run my emergency checklist like a pro and since there are at least 4 other airplanes flying in the pattern with us, I am looking ahead of us for the airplane that we are following about 2 miles behind.  All of a sudden I see this airplane looking thing about 10 o'clock, around 200 feet above us and approximately a half-mile ahead of us.  Hmmm.  Then it moves to 11 o'clock.  Then it's almost right in front of us.  I know it's not an airplane because it isn't moving like one....OH SHIT!  

"IT'S A BIRD!"

"SHIT!  WATCH OUT!"  

I push the nose down and dive about 200 feet.  The bird, which looked very similar to a bald eagle or a very large falcon with a white head flew just over us.  I would say we missed it by about 50 feet or less.  In fact, that picture is pretty much the imagine I still have burned into my brain.  It was flying at us and we were going about 95 mph.  Let's just say it would have made quite a mess.  After some heavy breathing for a few seconds, we got back on course for a simulated engine-out landing...which I did magnificently.  After 2.1 hours today, we landed.  Everything looked good.  

So, I have a flight tomorrow afternoon.  We are doing prep-for-check ride oral and flight tomorrow afternoon.  Then I take my check ride at 8 am on Wednesday.  HOPEFULLY, I'll have my multi-engine add-on rating by noon on Wednesday!  Wish me luck!