Prioritize please!

On Sunday, I made a very unusual mistake while playing drums for worship service. It was not that I forgot to turn on my in-ears monitor prior to clicking off the first song. That is not unusual for me. I have done it three times in the last year. Rather, it was that when I realized that I could not hear, I immediately tried to turn the monitors on. I did this instead of concentrating on the higher priority activity of playing the music. The band follows me. I know the song. I could play without hearing a thing for most of the song. But I did not do this. Instead, I reached over to turn on the monitor, missing the entry into the chorus, getting off on the time and nearly derailing the entire band. The bass player chuckled as he rarely hears me screw up. Laugh it up!

Today. I flew with a different instructor. I was a bit nervous as this instructor was evaluating my progress. I new checklists were critical in this evaluation, so I tried to be thorough in all cases. Every thing up to the threshold of the runway was near flawless. Tower clears me to take-off; I enter the runway and line up on the center line. I then proceeded to do a nice take-off. I am about 150 feet above the thresh hold when my instructor kindly states that the transponder is still on stand-by. It is set to the correct code, as I confirmed that with the tower. I neglected to do the last TLT (time, lights and transponder) check on the runway.

Now, here is the priority problem. I really wanted to release the throttle and switch the transponder on. For a second, my hand did leave the throttle, even with my instructor's advice to not worry about it 'now'. I was not in any critical danger. I had a competent co-pilot, I had a positive climb attitude, airspeed was well within the green and the airspace was clear. Had I been alone and a bird decided to end its life through the air-intake or the engine failed or a plane taking off from the parallel runway decided to slide over into my line of flight (that occurred later), then the transponder would not seem so important at 150 AGL. What seems as a small issue is super critical in these cases.

It seemed appropriate that, after this little lesson, my instructor wanted to practice aborted take-off procedures. The first time was too easy. I had the throttle back well before Vr. The second time, I was already 3 to 5 feet of the ground. As expected, I made a common mistake. As the power was cut, I did not compensate fast enough with left rudder as the gyroscopic forces, corkscrew and torque from the propeller were dampened.

All in all, this was a great day to fly. I got good feedback and my landings continue to improve.