I had owned the plane for 3 months and had flown in her a handful of times. The new cluster was in and working, the spring winds were finally dying down and I was progressing through my private pilot slowly, but surely. Did you catch that? Yes it was spring and my new headache was slowly gathering, building, reeking meham about which I didn’t even know.
For the first few months, the plane was tied down as far from the terminal as you could get and right next to fields of grass. Honestly, this was fair, the plane wasn’t on the line yet. I scheduled a flight with my instructor to just get the plane up and flying rather than sitting there. During pre-check I see it, one of my favorite things is building a nest in the tail of the plane. I love birds and going birding, but on that day they fell a little out of favor. We pulled out as much as we could (or what we thought was all of it), finished the pre-flight, and took off.
Upon takeoff, we shoot up into the air. All is well, altimeter indicates a climb, airspeed was live. I was nearing 900 ft asl and readying to turn west to head out to the practice area when the airspeed jumped. What!? It took me and my instructor a moment to realize what our eyes were seeing, the airspeed was not reading correctly. It would pop up then down, up, down. We immediately change course and stay in the pattern to return back to the runway and land safely. Perfect, another problem to figure out.
Hi Josie! I'm a private pilot and will be getting checked out to rent your plane soon. Do you have the aircraft with performance profile and w&b set up in ForeFlight that can be shared? It would be nice if the school had these downloadable for each of the planes in their rental fleet.