Numbers

It's been about two months since I've totalled the columns in my logbook and I'm down to one open page left, so I figured it was a good excuse to whip out the calculator and get everything into shape.

The milestone, of sorts, was my total time, which is just a hair north of 700 hours. That's not a lot, nor is it a little I guess.

Dual given is also approaching a bit of a mini-milestone and is just a hair shy of 350 hours. Or, to put it another way, half of the time I've spent in the air has been as an instructor. I suppose that's kinda cool and the ratio between dual given and total time will only continue to increase.

One logbook's worth of pages also represents 206 hours of cross-country time, 10 hours inside of one cloud or the other, 43 hours trucking around in the dark, 380 day landings, 48 night landings and 120 instrument approaches.

Looking back over the past 90 days my average flight has been 1.3 hours long, which makes sense since that's about how long a typical lesson lasts.

My longest single leg was 4.3 hours from Quincy, Ill. back to Crystal. The headwinds were fierce that day and groundspeeds were in the 75 knot range most of the way. That's a long time to sit anywhere, particularly in a 172. We put in 34 gallons of gas after that trip and I was thankful for the long-range tanks that hold 50 gallons of usable fuel in that airplane.

The span in years has been long, the first entries are from 1994, and it seems like ages ago that I took my freshly earned private pilot's certificate and blasted off from Ohio on trips to Washington, DC, Maine, New York or Detroit.

My very first cross-country trip as a new pilot nearly ended in disaster when I pushed on into worsening weather, wound up flying into a cloud at night and ended up landing in a few miles visibility and rain. My feet shook on the ride home from the airport after that one and thankfully things have been much less eventful since then.

I've put one scratch on an airplane, taking a nick out of the tail skid on our Cirrus. Even though I wasn't actually doing the flying when it happened I was the instructor on board, so the responsibility is mine alone.

The airplane type I've flown the most has been Cessna's lovely 172, with nearly 500 hours. Next up is the wonderful 182RG at just over 100 hours and then the Cirrus, in which I've spent just a hair under 50 hours. All told I've flown 13 different aircraft types, ranging from the lowly Cessna 150 up to the speedy Piper Malibu.

Most of them make perfect sense to me, although my 30 minutes logged in the Malibu hasn't gone far toward a deep understanding of that airplane. At least I can say I've actually landed the thing, which can't be said of four of the other airplane types in my logbook.

I've been using an electronic logbook for a few years now and you can't beat the simplicity of the thing. There's no totaling columns up every week or so, no writing as small as possible to cram everything into one line and it's a snap to sort the data.

But I still like my paper logbook as well, so I guess I have some old school tendencies. Entering the data twice is a hassle but I'm not quite ready to give up my paper logbook.

There are a lot of good memories in that old logbook, along with some bad ones.

My new one is a big professional deal I bought with a gift certificate and has a few more columns to which I hope to start adding numbers. It also has at least three times the total pages as my old logbook so it'll be a while before it to is filled with memories.