Showed up at the club a bit early today. My booking was for 5 but I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get to the airport from work at rush hour so I left work early. Turns out it took me about a half hour to get there. I left Nortel at around 4 and traffic wasn’t that bad. I think if I had left at 4:30 I wouldn’t have made it in a half hour because traffic would have been that much worse. Note to self, I think the latest I can leave and still make it by 5 is probably 4:15.
Anyways, I read up a bit more on Spins while I was waiting for Brad. When I finally did talk to Brad he asked me if I wanted to fly today or just do the briefing on Spins and Spirals. He didn’t figure we had time to do both. I guess it must have been pretty obvious that I wanted to fly because he told me to go and get a plane. I asked him if he could show me a spin today and he said he would. Cool stuff.
He told me that today was all me, he wasn’t going to do anything until we got to the practice area. That wasn’t completely true since he was the one who called in to get our transponder code. What a pain in the ass that is! New system that started this week that says you have to call Montreal to get a transponder code before your flight. The old system was that Ottawa tower would give you a transponder code just after take off. I’m not really sure why they implemented this new system, but I’m hoping that it doesn’t stick around for too long.
Anyways, no huge problems on take off or anything. Brad tells me I starting lifting off a bit too soon. He said I should wait for at least 55 KIAS before pulling back. No problem…committed to memory. :)
I’m still having a bit of trouble understanding everything I hear on the radio. Part of it was because I was a little too focused on what I was doing and part of it was my headset I think. Don’t take headset number 4! I’m also still a bit nervous (not sure why) on the radio so that doesn’t help.
Anyways, eventually we make it out to the practice area and we started with a few power off stalls. We moved onto power off with flaps, followed by power on and then power on with flaps. Everything went pretty damn good. Before we headed back I got Brad to show me a spin. We made sure everything was secure and that we weren’t over any populated areas. In order to do a spin the aircraft has to be stalled so that’s what he did…stalled. After the stall it didn’t take long before we were pointed nose to the ground spinning down towards the gound! Brad recovered pretty quickly, after about a turn or so and we climbed back up to where we started. I think we lost about 600 feet in a few seconds! I was psyched! I asked him to do another one and he graciously obliged. Same thing pretty much, but we must have turned a bit more because we lost more like 800 feet the second time.
On the way back we did a little more side slipping practice. I’m not very good at that yet. I got to do the landing today. Not much wind, maybe a 4 Kt cross wind. Again. a little bit of side slipping on the landing. I pulled back a bit too much on my flare. Not soo much that we dropped really hard to the runway but it could have been smoother. Next time.
Our next lesson will be on spins and spirals. Should be a fun one.