Lessons seven and eight

[Scott]

It's been a good week. I scheduled three flight lessons, and flew all
three. Sometimes, it does work out.

So Wednesday was flight 7, we stayed local and did ground reference
maneuvers. I think I did alright, did pretty well holding my altitude and
airspeed, and I believe my ground track was reasonably good. I ought to
take my little GPS navtoy next time; it's not aviation, but it records a
breadcrumb trail that would be useful for postflight review.

Then, surprise, we had another one of those engine "failures" at ground
reference altitude. Whee, not much time to do *anything* at 900ft AGL! I
nailed my glide speed and picked a good field, but flopped on my check flow.
I know what needs to be done, but in the heat of the moment my brain stops
about halfway through. I just need to keep doing it until I can do it right
every time.

This morning was flight eight. I show up and learn that my CFI no longer
works for the flight school. Well, sad news, but not unexpected. I end up
flying with the chief pilot, and frankly I enjoyed seeing the differences in
teaching style. I'm scheduled with yet another CFI next week, and we'll see
how that goes. Darn the luck, though, just when you have one of them almost
paper-trained, you get a new one.... :)

We did a little get-to-know-ya on the ground, reviewed where I was in the
syllabus, then decided to go out to do some stalls, which is one of my weak
areas. It went pretty well. We started in with power-on stalls, which turn
out to be much less scary than I'd expected. My tendency to lose heading
popped up immediately, so he had my fly into a stall and stay there,
bobbling along at full power, nose to the sky, stall horn wailing, just
working on keeping my heading and keeping the wings level. Two or three
minutes of that is a lot of work! But it did me good, showed me what kind
of control pressures I need to apply, and by the end of the hour I was doing
a lot better with approach stalls as well. Still room for improvement, but
seeing real progress on such a sore spot is a great confidence booster.

Landings. Slight but steady improvement. I'm starting to believe that in
time, I may learn to land well enough that a non-pilot passenger would be
willing to fly with me a second time. A worthy goal.

[Clark]

Post by Scott
It's been a good week. I scheduled three flight lessons, and flew all
three. Sometimes, it does work out.
So Wednesday was flight 7, we stayed local and did ground reference
maneuvers. I think I did alright, did pretty well holding my altitude
and airspeed, and I believe my ground track was reasonably good. I
ought to take my little GPS navtoy next time; it's not aviation, but it
records a breadcrumb trail that would be useful for postflight review.
Then, surprise, we had another one of those engine "failures" at ground
reference altitude. Whee, not much time to do *anything* at 900ft AGL!
I nailed my glide speed and picked a good field, but flopped on my check
flow. I know what needs to be done, but in the heat of the moment my
brain stops about halfway through. I just need to keep doing it until I
can do it right every time.
This morning was flight eight. I show up and learn that my CFI no
longer works for the flight school. Well, sad news, but not unexpected.
I end up flying with the chief pilot, and frankly I enjoyed seeing the
differences in teaching style. I'm scheduled with yet another CFI next
week, and we'll see how that goes. Darn the luck, though, just when you
have one of them almost paper-trained, you get a new one.... :)
We did a little get-to-know-ya on the ground, reviewed where I was in
the syllabus, then decided to go out to do some stalls, which is one of
my weak areas. It went pretty well. We started in with power-on
stalls, which turn out to be much less scary than I'd expected. My
tendency to lose heading popped up immediately, so he had my fly into a
stall and stay there, bobbling along at full power, nose to the sky,
stall horn wailing, just working on keeping my heading and keeping the
wings level. Two or three minutes of that is a lot of work! But it did
me good, showed me what kind of control pressures I need to apply, and
by the end of the hour I was doing a lot better with approach stalls as
well. Still room for improvement, but seeing real progress on such a
sore spot is a great confidence booster.
Landings. Slight but steady improvement. I'm starting to believe that
in time, I may learn to land well enough that a non-pilot passenger
would be willing to fly with me a second time. A worthy goal.

Gotta agree with you that it's prolly a real good idea to learn to land
well. :-)

I remember being given a diagram annotated with power settings, descent
rates, and distances when learning to land. No big deal, I thought to
myself, I'm an engineer so I'll check their math as a means to fully
understanding the approach. I checked the numbers and found the diagram
left the aircraft about 200 feet above the runway at the touchdown point if
the numbers were flown precisely. Hmmm, something was fishy. Maybe I made
an error somewhere in my analysis? So I asked the instructor about it and
he said that my math was correct but they still used the diagram anyway...

Anyway, from my point of view there is nothing scary about slow flight or
stalls in a Cessna or Piper trainer. We know what the aircraft is going to
do and it is our job to make sure it does it when and where we want. Keep a
sharp eye on the horizon and be quick on the rudder to keep the wings
level. It gets real fun when you do it under the hood!