Well it has been nearly a month since the last time I was flying. Booked a double with Brad today so we had time to do a briefing on stalls. That went ok, no big surprises. The plan was to get up there and do some power off stalls and then maybe towards the end if we had time we’d also do some power on stalls. I also asked Brad (upon Andy’s suggestion) if he could show me a spin. He didn’t seem too keen on the idea.
There was quite a strong cross wind today, something like 10 kts, gusting 18 or something like that. The wind was nearly 90 degrees to the runway. As I mentioned, I haden’t done any flying for nearly a month so I was a bit nervous about the take off. No worries though, I still had an instructor sitting beside me. :)
We got our clearance for take off, actually we got clearance for an “immediate takeoff” which meant we kind of had to hurry since there was someone coming in for a landing. We zipped out onto the runway and without slowing down, gave her full power. I thought we were doing ok, heading down the runway pretty straight, but Brad kept saying “ride the right rudder, more right rudder,” so that’s what I did. I’m not sure if I just misunderstood what he was trying to tell me or what but since he asked for more right rudder, I gave him more right rudder and well…we starting veering right as would be expected. Luckily we were up to speed by this point so I just pulled the nose up and we started to climb. It was a very strange take off if you ask me.
Right away after starting to climb it got pretty damn bumpy! We headed out over BC (Bells Corners) and the thermals were just incredible. As usual I was supposed to keep my altitude below 1600, but at one point I had the plane in a pretty good nose down attitude and we were still climbing! I managed to get down under 1600 and then radioed Terminal to ask for clearance to head up to 3000. Once we got clearance we headed up in search of calmer air.
Once over the practice area we did kind of a refresher. Brad asked me to fly at 80 kts and 2200 RPM. Then he got me to do some slow flight, 55 kts. I’ll admit, I didn’t really remember how to get into slow flight at first so Brad did a little demo for me. Basically the procedure is to drop your power to around 1500 RPM, hold the nose up to bleed off speed until you get to the desired speed and then bump the power back up to around 2000 RPM. We did that for a while until I was comfortable with it again. Brad made the comment that I should be looking outside more. Noted.
Next we tried some power off stalls. Actually we started with stopping the onset of a stall, before even letting the stall happen. After that we actually let the stall happen and recovered from it. No big surprises. We didn’t get to power on stalls. Next time.
On the way back to the airport we played around more with flaps. That was pretty interesting. It’s such a strange feeling to be flying with full flaps because you’ve got such a nose down attitude. Everything inside me is saying, “this just doesn’t seem right, it feels like we’re plumetting to the ground.” Needless to say that wasn’t the case.
We took our regular route back towards the airport and got set up for landing. There was still a pretty good crosswind so we ended up crabbing in for our landing approach. It was a very strange feeling to be flying in “twisted” to the runway. Once we got down low enough we basically straightened out and landed. Brad talked me through the whole landing but I was doing the flying (as far as I know anyways :) )
After the flight I felt like I had been pretty rusty, but Brad thought I did pretty good considering how much time I had taken off. I’ve got another lesson booked for tomorrow so we’ll see how that goes.