Meet Booey, my new four legged copilot. We adopted him from the Washington Animal Rescue League last weekend, and brought him home last night. He’s a 4-month-old Beagle mutt, with white socks on his feet and a brown and black coat. Still very much a puppy, Booey is cautiously curious but adapting well to his new surroundings… much like a new primary student.

His first flight is scheduled for Friday morning, when we’ll take him with us to Chicago in a friend’s twin engine airplane. I’m preparing him for the trip by getting him acclimated to his travel crate and doggie earmuffs. I’m sure it won’t be long before he feels at home in the sky, too.

I have never felt more alive and refreshed than I did on this trip to Oshkosh… enjoying the simple pleasures of flight and spending time with good friends, old and new. As much as I get a thrill out of figuring out a new avionics suite or flying fast and high in the clouds (which I did a bit of on the flight home from Wisconsin on Saturday night in a Cessna 182), something about the light sport scene struck an untapped nerve in me, and made me want to tickle it some more.

With a cup of coffee in my hand and a black and white cow spotted baseball cap on my head, I wandered around the EAA ultralight camp with a childlike smile on my face. These people were all about fun, pure and simple. They weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere, and didn’t want to engage in protracted conversations about flight into known icing and thunderstorm avoidance. The only icing of concern was the white sugary goo melting onto my already sticky fingers from a cinnamon roll the size of a tundra tire.

I was reminded that one of the principal reasons I learned to fly was to experience nature from a unique vantage point, to see the world in a new way. It’s kind of nice to slow down and smell the freshly cut grass for a while.

With a new vacuum pump installed in the airplane and all systems in the green, we took off around 8:15 a.m. and headed for Salisbury, Maryland. The goal of the lesson was to fly several instrument approaches and then return to base.

The photo above was taken on the approach into nearby Easton, Maryland. The tower controller there told us that there was a heavy rain shower over the airport moving toward us. As we approached the runway visibility in the rain shower dropped to about two miles, and while that was plenty for us to have have landed if we’d wanted to, instead we climbed back up into the clouds for some more fun.

For those of you who don’t appreciate the significance of such an event: The engine driven vacuum pump in an airplane provides the suction that allows the gyroscopic flight instruments — the heading indicator and attitude indicator — to function. These instruments are necessary for a pilot flying in the clouds to maintain control of the airplane without the benefit of any visual reference to the natural horizon. So if the vacuum pump fails, the suction disappears, the gyroscopes stop spinning and the instruments can no longer provide accurate information about the airplane’s pitch, bank and direction of flight.

My student and I were returning to the Baltimore area from Lancaster, Pennsylvania this morning on a routine instrument training flight when, about 15 miles from the airport, he noticed that the heading indicator displayed its orange system failure flag. “That can’t be good,” I said out loud as we descended through the bases of the clouds toward the runway. I looked lower on the panel and saw that the suction gauge was reading zero, meaning that the vacuum pump had failed. If we were in the clouds at that moment with no easy way out, we would have had to declare an emergency to ATC.

Fortunately, we were already below the clouds with the airport in sight, and Tom could control the plane easily by orienting it visually with the natural horizon. What I found interesting about the failure was how long it took for the symptoms to fully develop. If I had to guess, I’d say about 3-4 minutes elapsed from the time Tom noticed the flag on the heading indicator until we landed with the heading indicator deflected about 40 degrees and the attitude indicator wobbling around like a beach ball floating on the water.

While I’m sorry that Tom has to spend money to replace the vacuum pump, I’m so glad that he got to experience this failure in his airplane in a relatively safe environment, clear of clouds and near his home airport. Hopefully he’ll never see this problem in this airplane again, but at least now he knows what it looks like. The best I can do during a training flight is to cover up the gyro instruments with sticky pad notes and say, “OK, your vacuum system just failed.” But there’s no way for me to simulate the slow death of this critical system in the airplane during flight. That’s the real value of computer simulation.

Why did I pack my things into the back of a Cessna 182RG on Friday morning and take off for a weekend on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard with a group of friends? Well, partly because I really needed a little vacation from the stresses of everyday life, and flying myself (as opposed to taking the water taxi or an airline flight as the others did) was part of the fun. The trip was part of the experience, not just a means to an end.

To get from central Maryland to the Massachusetts coastline I navigated through some of the most complicated airspace in the nation, and had a blast doing it. Squeezing maximum value out of the system gives me an incredible rush, almost equal to the rush I got when I made what was probably the softest short-field landing of my life on Runway 10 at Block Island, RI (wheels down and off the runway in about 500 feet; I made the first taxiway). We stopped there for lunch (lobster roll sandwiches) and a walk on the rocky beach before heading east to Martha’s Vineyard.

The weather was perfect, with excellent visibility and just a few fluffy white clouds to give the sky definition and visual depth. What struck me most about the view from 3,000 feet was the color of the water in the sound — shades of turquoise and emerald so clear you could see the sand bars below. If I was not looking at a map of New England I would have sworn I was somewhere in Florida.

On left downwind to land on Runway 10 at Block Island, RI.

In addition to the mental challenges of flight planning and navigation, one of the other things I really enjoy about flying is the physical challenge of controlling the airplane and making it do what I want it to do, when I want to do it. As I approached Martha’s Vineyard from the north, a large business jet was also approaching from the opposite side of the island. The tower controller told the jet pilot to make a wide left turn to get in line behind me to land, but I was in a position to help the guy out by keeping my approach very short, so that I could get off of the runway quickly. I sensed from both the pilot’s and the controller’s radio communications that they appreciated my efforts, and that made me feel really good about myself as a pilot.

The flight back to Maryland yesterday was relaxing and uneventful. We filed IFR and flew west over Long Island at 6,000 feet, then turned south past New York City and Asbury Park, New Jersey — which of course compelled me to play some Bruce Springsteen on the iPod. It was hotter and hazier than it was on Friday, but visibility was good enough that as we neared Baltimore we descended and flew low over Annapolis, Maryland before landing back home in Gaithersburg.

My next long flight is just two shorts weeks away, when I’ll join thousands of other pilots for a week of aviation exuberance in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Was this factoid covered in my preflight briefing? Not exactly. There is a blanket “stadium TFR” that applies to large sporting events, during which airplanes are not supposed to fly within a 3-mile radius of the stadium up to 3,000 feet. The only way I would have known about the game in advance is if I followed Major League Baseball and, specifically, the Yankees — which I have not done in years.

Because I was flying inside the Class B airspace and talking to air traffic controllers, I was never in any danger of violating the TFR. Still, it bothers me that as a pilot I am required to keep up with professional sports in addition to worrying about more important things, like the weather and how my engine is running.

I’m really looking forward to my flight to Martha’s Vineyard on Friday for the Fourth of July weekend, especially since this fantastic weather is supposed to be with us for the next couple of days. We’re planning to take the scenic route to get there, beginning with a tour of New York City from the eastern shore of the Hudson River. From there, I’ll plan to stop on Block Island for lunch on the beach (lobster salad, perhaps?) before heading to our destination.

You know, it’s been way too long since I’ve taken a long cross country flight just for fun and recreation. This is going to be sweet.

What really happened yesterday was that I experienced what can happen, what is possible, when a person opens their mind and heart to the flow of positive energy. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with a positive attitude.

My first flight lesson in a Seminole was on September 18, 2009, but I didn’t really begin focusing on the training again until March. It was a very long and dark winter, with very little positive energy flowing around in my world. That made it difficult to focus on accomplishing my goal. But then something changed, the cosmic tide shifted, and before I knew it I was back in the cockpit, nestled between two engines, trying my best to make them purr.

I woke up yesterday to a beautiful blue sky, decorated with fluffy white clouds. I looked at the appointment on my calendar and smiled when I realized that I was going to have the chance to achieve a goal, to make a positive step forward. The day was mine, and I left the house with a checklist in my bag and a smile on my face. I was prepared, calm and confident that everything would be all right. It was going to be a good day, because I was going to make it so. I was not going to that airport to fail, I was going to succeed. But I knew that even if things didn’t go according to plan — if the airplane broke down, or if I made a critical mistake for some reason — it would be a learning experience, and at the end of the day, I would have spent a few hours doing what I love. It was, in my mind, literally impossible for it to be a bad day.