Today was exciting! Weather was coming in and as we landed in Titusville (KTIX) it started to rain a little bit. It slowly got worse and we knew that we had to switch out quickly. We swapped seats and I began to power up. As I cleared the left and right engine, rain poured down violently but the sky was clear to the east. We called up ground, got clearance, ran up and spoke to tower. Tower advised us that the winds change to 360 and that the storm wasn’t too bad at the opposite end of the runway. As soon as we departed, we got a clearance to head east bound along the river but not to pass across the river because we were already edging Cape Canaveral’s Restricted Airspace. Weather got better as we climbed out and up to 4400″ Taking off in pouring rain was an exciting feeling. I probably wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t with my instructor, or if I hadn’t looked at radar while on my own.

I called up Daytona Approach for flight following and decided that I could fit an approach, the ILS 7L into KDAB, before we headed north for some maneuvers. As I was getting vectored around for the final approach course, we noticed that there was Cat 4 / 5 storms building up right on the approach end. I called up approach for an advisory and they told me that it was okay. I proceeded and my instructor while I was on final cut one of the engines. I proceeded inbound whilst correcting for the adverse thrust. I got off of the localizer a bit but managed to stay on glideslope. I got back to my course heading and went around. Avoiding any weather, we headed north and did some emergency descents, power on and off stalls, slow flight and then saw a huge buildup just west of Flagler (X47). We decided that it would be a good idea to head home. As we were on the 45 degree entry, people were calling around that while there were 5 in the pattern, they wanted to change runways from 11 to 24. The wind was variable as a storm was coming, so 11 was still okay. There was just a lot of traffic and some aircraft even started calling names. As one aircraft went around because of the traffic on runway 11, he decided to just begin landing on 24 while were just landing on 11. As we were rolling on 11 right because 24, we saw the other plane land. It was just ridiculous. Bunch of idiots I tell ya. No respect.

So, about my flight today. I would probably rate it as a 7 out of 10. I didn’t feel like I was on top of anything at all. It’s such a disappointment to me to know that I’m so close to a checkride and that I’m actually not progressing anymore. I’m actually getting worse. It stinks so bad! Oh well, I have the rest of the week to rebuild my confidence.

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