I earned my Complex and High Performance endorsements to my Private Pilots Certificate today. I’ve been flying with an instructor since the beginning of May to accomplish this feat. My new endorsements allow me to exercise my Pilots Private skills in airplanes with retractable gear and more than 200 horsepower engines. The airplane used for my training is a 1978 Cessna 182 RG with a 235 horsepower, six-cylinder engine. It’s much heavier than what I’m used to flying and it took me a little under 12 hours of flight time to get used to the handling characters of “Large Marge”.
A rain storm was passing to the north of the airfield today as I performed some landings and demonstrated a manual gear extension (in case the wheels don’t come out when I tell them to). There was quite a bit of traffic up there with us, so we extended the pattern a couple of times. It gave us a nice view of the Lake Michigan shoreline near the Wisconsin-Illinois state border.
I’m excited about my new endorsements as this opens up some cross-country flight opportunities. I’m really happy I was able to accomplish this during the pandemic.
