NAPLES
Written: 18 APRIL 2004

 

I've finally started working as a flight instructor. I've been working down here at Naples Air Center for about a week now and I've flown about 12 hours. Kristian and I moved into our new apartment three days ago, called Misty Pines, located 5 minutes from the airport.

We got off work today at 2 and saw the opportunity to give Tower a visit. We talk to them quite a lot, so it was good to make contact and meet the people behind the voices. Very nice people up there who showed us around and explained what they did. Everything makes more sense when you've been there and see what they see and are explained some of the procedures they follow. Later today we went to the beach where we spent about 3 hours. Just about the right number of people and nice temperature in the ocean. It feels kind of tropical when there are dolphins swimming around 10 meters away from us.

Naples is a really nice city, as a matter of fact the prettiest city I've seen during our weeklong roadtrip. There's an incredible amount of rich people here which is reflected in parts of the city here. The main street is 5th Ave which runs all the way down to the beach, and there's alot of nice restaurants along this avenue. The cars here are some of the best I've ever seen anywhere and I've heard that this is the city with the most business jets per capita, which should indicate that this is a pretty wealthy place.
The apartment we found is situated in a community called Misty Pines and it has a fairly large kitchen, a large livingroom, two bedrooms and two baths. There's one large master bedroom and one small, but we sorted that out very diplomaticly by agreeing to change halfway through the lease.

The airport is fairly close to the city center and is a class D airport. It is without doubt the busiest class D airport I've ever been to, so it took a couple of flights to get used to it. This is mainly because of all the businessjets and small airplanes that come and go. The school is situated close to the General Aviation terminal. We have to be at the school from 8 til 18 every day with one day off during the week. I suspect this can get rather exhausting in the long run, and quite boring as we don't really have anything to do here but to read the JAR-FCL when we're not flying. The school does alot of JAA certificates and alot of the students come from over seas. They have a fairly large number of planes including Cessna 152, Cessna 172, one new Cessna 172R, Piper Warrior, Piper Arrow and Piper Seminole. Right now I'm checked out on the C152, C172R and the Warrior. Tomorrow my first student will be starting, a guy from the UK. He is starting from scratch and is doing the JAA PPL, which will be exciting for me. He is going to fly the Warrior, which is the same plane as the one I have a picture off on the header of my homepage.

More pictures at: NAPLES PICTURE GALLERY