Jenson Button got the second pole position already.

Kinda hard to believe when I heard that he actually won the Australian Grand Prix.

Is he using some kinda black magic or what??

But anyway, at least there is some new excitements in F1. Not just McLaren and Ferrari's show.

Airways 4 was yesterday night. Destination to Penang, WMKP.

We took off at 1910hours after waiting for the evening thunderstorm to stop.

Forecast Penang thunderstorm and rain from 1800hours to 2200hours local time. "We will turn back if it is real bad there," my instructor said.

Climbed to 7000feet and clouds were all over, from mainland towards the sea.

Further up south is Penang and as expected, alot of Big Mommas on top of the island. From left cockpit view, mainland was covered fully by low clouds.

10minutes to reaching Penang, frequent lightning strikes were detected in our Stormscope radar.

Butterworth Approach informed us that from their weather radar, there was a "small gap" between the Big Mommas that we could fly through.

But something went wrong with the autopilot seconds after we transmitted. It disengaged by itself.

Initially I thought maybe it was my right arm tapped on the Disengage Button accidentally. I tried to engage it again but it was useless.

My instructor said "We are not gonna take any chances to fly through this weather without autopilot."

And so we requested 180 back to home base 8000feet. Clearance granted and I took over the control manually to fly back.




This morning was the last airways sortie, Airways 3 routing to Alor Setar, WMKA in the morning 10.30am local time.

Beautiful weather. No Big Mommas. No rain.

Just haze. Visibility was 8km.

It was supposed to be a night flying airways to Penang but the weather was just not good to go. One channel of thunderstorms over the sea above 2000feet.

We cancelled the flight plan and went for simulator session for an hour and a half before the sim machine crashed. -_-"

Not my fault. I was about to flare and land then the screen just went upside down. Instructor gave up trying to reset it and we went back to hangar to check out weather again.

Local weather was good for circuits&landing and so I practiced 2 hours of that.

2 hours of circuits and landings!!! Damn...I lost count of how many touch&gos I made. 15? 20?