Three days after I passed my checkride, I had the pleasure of taking my wife, Lisa, up for my first flight with a passenger! It was a very proud moment for me as this was my first real flight after the checkride as a full pilot. I had taken up Lisa with my CFI before, but this was the first time just the two of us.
Since Wednesdays are our normal “date night”, I planned a trip to Schaumburg airport (06C) to eat at “Pilot Pete’s”…a restaurant which I heard lots of good things about (plus I had never been to 06C before). Since my flight was in the evening and we’d be returning after dark, I decided to take one of our club’s 172SP’s. The 32 nm trip took only about 16 minutes as these SP’s really haul (especially with only 2 people inside). The ride went great, and it was very cool to fly as close to O’Hare airspace as Schaumburg gets. I had to fly pretty low to keep under the Class B airspace, but it gave us some awesome views of huge houses in Barrington and such.
Dinner at Pilot Pete’s was outstanding…what a cool restaurant! We were seated overlooking our plane on the ramp even. It was very cool to see other planes landing and taking off, and especially cool to hear little kids in neighboring tables awed at the planes coming in and leaving. It was fun to think that only minutes before they saw ME land in amazement!
The flight back was very smooth – a beautiful Chicago night. Visibility was great. Lisa was admittedly scared coming in for the landing at Westosha (since it’s so dark in Wisconsin)…but it went fine. I then went around the pattern for 2 more full stop landings (just to stay night-current for another 90 days). On the way home we talked about how great our new type of date night was – one where you FLY to your destination for the date!
This flight I logged 1.3 hours of flight as PIC.