I've had a really good days flying today, everything worked out really well for me. My first flight was at 7am, so my walk over to the flight school was in the dark. The airport just looks fantastic at this time of day, covered in a thousand blue taxi-way lights. The weather was perfect with the ATIS (The Automated Terminal Information Service) reporting calm winds for the first time since I've been here.

We took off, and after a quick review of the manouvers my instructor told me to intercept the 330 radial for Vero Beach VOR. I'd already tuned in the navigation radio to this so all very straight forward and something I remembered from my PPL. Then we did something new, a DME arc. DME gives you a slant range distance from a transmitter, and a DME Arc means flying around the beacon in a circle or part of a circle maintaining the same distance from it. My instructor showed me a very straight-forward technique, basically flying between 10 degree radials and adjusting heading by 10 degrees each time. It works perfectly on a calm day like today! Then it was flying to a NDB which is another type of navigational beacon.

The last part of the flight was intercepting a localizer for the return to Fort Pierce. The localizer is similar to a VOR in the way it is intercepted but it is more precise, and is only followed in one direction, (unless you are flying the backcourse). It gives horizontal guidence for the approach to an airport, sometimes with a glideslope to provide vertical guidence. The glideslope at Fort Pierce is currently out of service (another piece of information ATIS gives me every morning!) so my instructor told me to which altitude to descend to as I followed the localizer. When he told me to take the foggles off and look outside, it was fantastic to see runway 9 stretched out ahead of me about a mile away, perfectly lined up for a landing. We actually had to land on runway 32, but it was still good. I finished that flight with possibly the best visual approach I've flown in the Duchess. It's great to have a day of still wind!

My Stage Check was this afternoon with the chief pilot. I flew very well, and he commented on how much smoother my flying was. We did the same manouvers, and then he pulled circuit breakers to make some of my instruments fail and had me do some turns and then pulled a mixture stopping one of the engines. We did another intercept of the Vero Beach VOR and a DME arc in the other diection from the morning flight and then back to Fort Pierce. On days like today when everything just works out, I know why I'm here!