I hope everyone enjoyed their long weekend! I know the Rensselaer Flying Club did. The Rensselaer Flying Club is a Union-sponsored club that goes on several flying trips each semester and participates in a national flying competition. This past weekend, I flew one of the airplanes on our trip to Portland, Maine. The club takes this trip every year. We typically land, have dinner, walk around town and return the next morning. However, this trip was a little different than the rest.
I took off from Albany International around 7 pm on Sunday. If anyone was around Sunday, you may remember that it was pouring rain! Moreover the clouds were overcast only 500 feet above the runway. We practiced flying in instrument conditions for the entire day before we took off and almost immediately flew into the clouds with no visibility and heavy rain racking the windshield of the small plane. For the entire two-hour trip we were in clouds with rain. As we prepared to fly an instrument approach into Portland—considering the possibility that we’d have to divert to Boston or even to New Hampshire—we began the decent. I was cleared for the approach and continued my decent, closely monitoring the instruments that were carefully guiding me down to the runway. I called out the altitudes as we got lower and lower. “Two-thousand feet for two fifty five”; no runway. “One thousand feet for two fifty five”; still no signs of ground. “Five hundred feet for two fifty five;” still no runway! We were about three hundred feet above the ground and as I prepared to abort the landing we popped out of the clouds to see the ground almost directly beneath us. I suddenly realized that the instrument that was guiding us onto the centerline of the runway was a little off. We were about 50 feet to the left of the runway! I punched the power and began a sharp right turn, the runway lights guiding me through the darkness. Once we were directly over the runway I banked sharply to the left and put the plane down about half way down the runway. Albeit, I had some nervous passengers—for the record they claim that they loved every second of it!—we made it safely and had a great time in Portland!
This entire trip was subsidized by the Rensselaer Union. There are over 130 clubs and organizations in the Union that go on similar adventures and have activities of interest to students. This story is living proof that there are things to do at Rensselaer! If you’re interested in seeing what clubs we have, go to http://union.rpi.edu or come visit the President of Union, Zack Ament.
As I mentioned in my article last week, the Senate went to visit all of the dining halls last Wednesday. We collected lots of fantastic information that will not only help us with projects that we are working on but also give us insight into problems that we need to address. I have asked one of our newly elected freshman senators, Max Yates, to lead a Response Task Force to sift through all of the collected information and write recommendations for courses of action. We will be publishing the findings and our responses to them on our web site at http://senate.union.rpi.edu. Again, we will be doing this on a monthly basis for the entire semester. This week also begins our greek storming initiative. We will be visiting each participating greek house this semester.
Hopefully everyone has finished their mid-term exams and can take a breather this week! Enjoy the rest of your week and good night.
