Dreams Can Come True

I am in my first week of airplane school and so far it seems like one of the best decisions I have ever made. I don’t miss my old job at all (sorry Microsoft!) and even though this is only the third day, I feel as if this is just the thing I do now.  I get up, I drive through the Duwamish Industrial Vortex and over to West Seattle where I spend 6 hours absorbing airplane goodness.

Speaking of that vortex … I am pretty sure that if I make a wrong turn on the route between my house and school I will be sucked into it, to join other hapless commuters in limbo. Here we will all be forced to bale cardboard boxes, sort recyclables, load rail car containers, smelt iron, and fill out bill-of-lading paperwork for all eternity. Some might dodge this fate and instead be condemned to swirl around on the area’s roads – entering and exiting highways 99, 599 and 509, and East AND West Marginal, almost making it to the oasis of Burien before being cruelly shunted off to the South Park transfer station, over and over and over again. Occasionally we’ll be allowed to go to one of South Park’s cantinas for lunch, but mostly we’ll have to survive on 3-eyed fish from the Duwamish Waterway.

Seriously though, who invented the street layout for this area?

Impressions from my first few days:

1. From the SSCC Aviation Division Student Handbook: “Do not use fire-fighting equipment for other purposes. Example: do not spray at beehives.” The bees will thank you.

2. I have an FAA-approved excuse to go shopping for tools.

3. “Nut-rotation” is a real technical term.

4. Sometime in the next couple of years, I will acquire the skills to work on all of these:

5. And, these:

Note, airplanes are for demonstration purposes only. Do not attempt to fly these planes.

In case you were wondering, the reason we have these in the shop is because while they’re small, they have many of the characteristics of full-sized transport (see, I just used a fancy aviation term) aircraft, including a pressurized cabin – so, they give us a way to learn about transport-class aircraft without needing a 747-sized hangar.

That’s all for today, but stay tuned for more tales from airplane school.