• Published 25th Feb 2016
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Silver Glow's Journal - Admiral Biscuit



Silver Glow takes an opportunity to spend a year at an Earth college, where she'll learn about Earth culture and make new friends.

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September 1 [Cessna]

September 1

I felt like I woke up a little bit later than normal even though the clock by the bed said it was earlier than I usually did. Changing time zones was really confusing.

I think if it hadn't been cloudy, I would have been able to see the sunrise from my hotel room, which would have been nice. But the clouds covered the whole sky as far as I could see.

And I couldn't poke my head out the window to get a feel for the weather conditions, which was too bad. I wish that hotels had windows that could be opened—my dorm room did, so why can't a hotel?

I had a little coffee-maker in my room, so I made a cup of coffee and then while it was brewing, I put the blankets and pillows back on the bed where they belonged.

I didn't know what time Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were going to come and get me which was kind of frustrating. I did know what room they were in and I could have gone and knocked on their door but if they were still sleeping I didn't want to wake them up. So instead I got out my Bible and sat in the chair and started reading Ezekiel.

He described God's chariot and the monsters which pulled it, and said that God looked like a man that looked like a rainbow that was on fire. I had a really hard time picturing exactly what that would look like, although I had once seen a fire rainbow, so maybe that was what He was like.

And then God told Ezekiel that he was supposed to tell the Israelites that He was mad at them, and to not be afraid. Instead of telling Ezekiel exactly what to say, God gave him a scroll which had the words written on it for Ezekiel to eat.

He wasn't happy that he was with the exiles, and he wasn't happy that he had to give them bad news, but he was wise enough to know that if he warned them and they didn't listen it wasn't his fault. God told Ezekiel that the Israelites were stubborn and I guess if they still didn't do what He told them to they must have been. Or maybe this book happened at the same time as another book—I'd have to ask Pastor Liz when I got back to Kalamazoo.

That reminded me that I wasn't sure that I had told her that I would miss our meeting today, so I got my telephone and sent her a telegram then I sat back down and read some more.

Then He told Ezekiel to make a clay model of Jerusalem and besiege it, and lie on his side for 390 days for the sins of Israel and 40 days for the sins of Judah and to only eat bread and drink water and to cook his bread over shit, which didn't sound like a very nice thing to have to do. And Ezekiel thought so, too, and told God that he didn't deserve that. So God said he could use cow shit and Ezekiel thought that would be okay but I wouldn't have been happy with that, either.

God also showed Ezekiel all the bad things that people were doing where they thought He couldn't see, and then He had a man mark all the good people and six other men killed all the bad people who hadn't followed His rules and who hadn't listened to Ezekiel.

God told Ezekiel that He had found out that there was a proverb in Israel that prophet's visions came to nothing, and that made God mad, so He said that he was going to make them come true right away, and then I heard a knock on my door and it was Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn.

We went downstairs and had breakfast in the hotel, 'cause they had a buffet. And Mister Salvatore asked me to guess where we were going to go today and I said an airplane factory and he looked sad that I'd figured it out. But Miss Cherilyn though it was funny.

So he said that we were going to the Cessna factory and we were going to get to see where they built airplanes and that I was also going to get to use a flight simulator, which was a fake airplane.

We drove on the odd figure-eight road and then to the further-away airport that I'd seen and there were actually two right next to each other. One of them was for the air force airplanes, and the other one was for the little Cessna airplanes, and that's where we went.

When we got there we had to wait until a woman named Jodi came out to meet us, because she was going to show us around. And she was really nice and smiled a lot and I liked her.

She was really smart, too. She gave me a little bit of history about Cessna, which had been started over a hundred years ago by a man named Clyde that built the first airplane west of the Mississippi, and then had started building and testing more but when he asked the bank for money they wouldn't give it to him so he left Oklahoma and came to Wichita. And then there was what she called a great depression and the company closed for a couple of years but then it re-opened when Clyde's nephews bought the company from him.

Jodi said that they'd produced lots of airplanes over the years including what was the most-produced airplane which was called the 172, and they still made it now.

The airplanes were actually built in a town called Independence, and she said that the best way to get there was to fly.

I was a little bit nervous about that but Mister Salvatore said that it was a smaller airplane and not pressurized so it wouldn't be the same, and I guess if I was going to go skydiving I would have to be in an airplane so I might as well get used to it.

So she took us out to a two-engined airplane which she said was called a 421, and the pilots were waiting for us on the ground and both of them shook my hoof and they let me sit at the front where I could watch what they were doing.

They had a lot to do with all the controls in the airplane even before we could fly, and then they stayed busy until we'd gotten a little ways off the ground. I was really curious but I didn't want to bother them, so I just watched.

One of the pilots had little cards that he'd read things off of sometimes, and then the other one would answer them. So I asked Jodi what they were and she said that they were checklists and it was very important to do what they said.

We flew for about an hour and it was a lot nicer than being in the big airplane. It didn't hurt my ears as much and while I still didn't like how the air inside the airplane wasn't moving at all so it tricked me about how we were flying, it wasn't too bad. Maybe it helped that I could focus on the pilots and what they were doing and also see through the windshield.

They had to read off more checklists before they could land and also talk to the airplane directors but we finally got done circling the field and landed, and then they drove the airplane over to a big white building which was the factory.

Jodi led us in and told me that I wasn't allowed to fly inside because of the risk of damaging an airplane and I said that I wouldn't.

There were several different kinds of airplanes and some of them were almost put together and others of them weren't. They had lots of blue equipment which was called fixtures and jigs, and those were used to help carry things without damaging them and to help put them on the airplane in exactly the right place.

I got to look at all the inside of a wing, where they have lots of little wire ropes that make all the controls work, along with tanks for fuel. And the people who were building it had to reach through panels on the top of the wing. And I saw an airplane skeleton and watched a woman using a tool called a rivet gun to put panels on the skeleton, and a man who was inside one that was attaching the flight instruments to their wires (there were a lot of wires), and then we went over and watched as a jet engine was put on the hindquarters of a sleek-looking airplane.

All around, besides the blue fixtures and jigs, there were tool chests like Aric's but they were a lot bigger and on wheels, and all different colors. Almost everybody had one of them near where they were working.

I tried not to stay too long at any one place because I distracted the workers and I felt bad about it. They were all eager to talk to me and explain what they were doing and show me some clever little bit of the airplane that I wouldn't be able to see once it was all the way put together.

It was a bit overwhelming seeing it all at once like that, but I kind of thought of it like the makerspace just a lot bigger. And the people who were working there reminded me of the makers because they were all really enthusiastic about what they were doing.

We got to tour a room where they had lots of parts which were waiting to go on an airplane, and also another room where the airplanes were painted, and there was one in there that had covers over its engines and windows so that paint wouldn't get on those.

Once our tour was done we went to a conference room where there was some lunch waiting for us—sandwiches and potato chips. I was really hungry because it was pretty late but I hadn't been thinking about eating while we were looking at the airplanes.

Jodi apologized and said it wasn't much but the only other place that catered was a barbeque truck and Mister Salvatore was sad that we hadn't had that, but Miss Cherilyn reminded him that he'd had barbeque last night.

After we'd eaten, we flew back to Wichita and then drove across town to another airport, which was where they had the flight simulators.

Those were little pods that you got in and they moved around kind of like a real airplane. So I met my instructor who was named Chuck, and he said that we were going to get right to it. He said that he'd tell me what to do and when to do it, and then once he thought I had the hang of it he'd let me fly on my own.

It was kind of crowded inside, because Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and Jodi also wanted to be in there and there was just enough room for them at the back.

He started off by teaching me what the most important controls were for and how they worked—there were a lot of other things but he said that I didn't have to worry about them; that when something needed to be done with them he'd do it for me.

There were pedals like a car that you pushed and a steering wheel that could tilt backwards and forwards and then levers to make the engines go and more levers to make the flaps come in and out of the wing and those were the most important controls. He said that pretty much any airplane built in the last fifty years would have those controls.

Then he showed me the most important flight instruments, like the artificial horizon and the attitude indicator and the speedometer and altimeter and he said that those were the most basic ones that I needed to know and he'd call my attention to others when they became important.

When Chuck thought that I mostly knew what things were in the cockpit, he said it was time to go flying and wanted to know if I wanted to have the full training or just have fun. Well, I thought that the full training would be fun, so we had to start out by reading through lots of checklists and that was mostly work for him because he would read something then explain it to me and then usually he would be the one who pushed the button or turned the dial because they weren't hoof-friendly at all.

When I'd been concentrating on all the buttons and switches he was showing me, the windshield had gotten a picture of an airport in it and then once we started moving so did the picture, so it was like we were actually moving on the ground. And we had to wait a little bit to do one more checklist before we took off, and then I was driving the airplane!

It didn't behave quite like a go-kart, but I kept it on the runway and he told me when to pull back on the control column (I had to hook my hooves over it, since I couldn't hold the demi-wheel with my hooves like he was holding it with his hands).

He told me when I was doing something that the airplane shouldn't and sometimes the airplane told me too. I tried to climb too fast and it started shaking the control column and saying 'stall,' and I had to make the nose go back down so it could get some more speed.

Once I'd gotten some practice with the controls, he let me do the flying without his help, and he just told me every now and then what I should do. It was strange, because it was almost like flying myself except that the airplane didn't respond as fast as I did, so I had to plan ahead and be gentle with the controls or else I would flip it upside down and then crash and he had to reset it so we could start back before where I'd crashed.

It was pretty smart to have this to practice in rather than a real airplane.

He told me to call for a vector to the airport, so I did, and then used the compass to point me in the right direction, and he showed me how the airplane could see different kinds of radio beacons so that it would know where it was. I didn't have to use them but it was one way that all airplanes could know where they were when it was too cloudy to see.

I didn't land the first time I was lined up with the runway; he had me do a touch-and-go so that I could get a feel for flaring the airplane except it turned into a touch and crash because I pulled the nose up too much when he told me to pull it up. So we had to try again and the next time I was more careful on the controls and it was a little bit wobbly going along the runway but he said that it had a strong landing gear and would survive that landing.

Well, I wanted to get it right so we tried a couple more times until I finally had it figured out and made a perfect landing on the runway and he said I'd done a good job.

Getting out of the simulator and back on solid ground was a little bit disorienting because I'd gotten so into being there that it was strange to not see an airport around us when I went out the door in the back and he said that real pilots felt that all the time, especially after a really intense session.

I thought before we left they'd like to see me fly, and so we went outside and I couldn't go too high because we were right next to the airport and I didn't want to cause them any problems since there were lots of airplanes flying in and out, but I knew that as long as I stayed below a few hundred feet I wouldn't be in anybody's way, so I took off and got up some speed and then started flying around lampposts and doing wing rolls on the driving paths, and they were impressed when I finally landed.

We went out to dinner with Jodi and Chuck, at a restaurant called the Hanger One Steakhouse and it had a control tower and an airplane hanging from the ceiling inside, which was really neat. And I wound up talking a lot with Chuck because he was a very experienced pilot, and it was fun to see where our experience overlapped and where it was different. He finally admitted that in a lot of ways I was the better flier, and that I'd flown in weather that he wouldn't wish upon his worst enemy.

But a lot of our experiences were kinda the same, too, even if mine were a little bit more extreme. And I'd learned from flying the simulator that what I could do with my wings was a lot different with what an airplane could do, because once you lost control it was really hard to get it back because of the delay in response. Plus, you couldn't just fold the wings and drop until you got good air again. Although even for us, that was kind of a last resort.

When it was time to go I hugged Jodi and Chuck and thanked them for the wonderful day. And Chuck said that he'd make sure that I got my simulator time counted on my pilot's license, just in case one day I decided that I wanted to fly an actual airplane and not a simulator.

It was dark when we got back to the hotel, and I went right up to my room, put the blankets back on the chair, and curled up to sleep.

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