Shotgun

It's been far too long shuffling around these two lesson flights of pre-flight and flight test...around 6 months actually. The reason is too complex or too long to even mention here about the unfortunate unforeseen events that led to the delay of my licencing.

However I am now a private pilot. I can carry passengers which means take some of my friends up. And it means that I can ride shotgun or in mutual flights for school.
Yesterday, I did just that. Riding shotgun with one of my classmates that finished their PPL early and is now close to Commercial Flight Test.
It is quite a different feeling, view, perspective sitting in the right seat when all this time I've been left seat. I sure did not fly the airplane, I was there only to "fly" really, helping out with radios, lookouts and keeping with the lesson plan.

However, yesterdays flight had to be cut short due to TCU's and CB's building up pretty fast at Buttonville and so we had to return earlier than expected. On the way back, monitoring TOWER first, it didn't seem busy at all. And so after calling at the reporting point, we were cleared direct the threshold. It made me think that tower is trying to get us in first before the other guy who called in from the east...we were coming from the north. And so he kept the speed up, direct numbers doing 120kts in C172. Until about 1/2 mile final where we dropped flaps, and started to slow down quickly. It felt like we were going reverse doing 65 after coming in at 120 kts. Runway was wet and winds were picking up and so we had to make sure that we had no drift and properly and assertively compensated for the crosswind.
Touchdown was a miniscule bounce to maybe just a foot and then consequently making a nice full stop landing.

We even got to practice giving PIREPs to other company airplane who were in the practice area or thinking of flying still.

A few hours later, I looked at the radar and saw a pretty good line of thunderstorm due to the Cold Front passing. As my friends and I were driving to a party due east, we were getting chased by the clearing after the thunderstorms. And so it gave us an extravagant view of not ONE but TWO COMPLETE rainbows ahead of us the entire trip.

Unrelated: I'm also in a struggle but like to call it process of making my own electronic logbook using VBAs and Excels...