I had to go up with one of the main instructors today. My choices were either Andrew Mackenzie or Gerry Thompson. Andrew seemed to be a bit more available than Gerry, so that’s who I ended up going with. The reason I had to go with one of those guys was so that they could evaluate how Brad is doing in teaching me.
It was an early booking. I arrived at the club at around 8 am. Andrew was not there yet so I waited. He showed up shortly after 8 and we went into his office and talked about what we would be doing, the spiral dive. Originally we were supposed to do some spins, but the conditions weren’t optimal for that so he opted to work on slipping instead.
It was quite windy today actually. The winds were coming out of the south-east today, and they were quite strong…probably the strongest I’ve experienced so far. Most everyone was using the big runway (32) but Andrew thought we might as well get in some cross wind take off experince so he got me to ask for a north field take-off. We were cleared for take-off on runway 04, which is the same as runway 22, but you travel in the opposite direction.
This was the first time I had taken off on runway 04 and it was with a pretty serious crosswind! I also had to ask for a ‘back track’ since Papa taxiway doesn’t actually come out at the end of runway 04. They gave us the back track since nobody else seemed to be using the runway. The takeoff was less than stellar. For some reason, either I wasn’t riding enough right rudder, or I may have even pressed a little left rudder, the plane started drifiting to the left, almost off the runway! The winds were coming from the right side btw. It didn’t seem to phase Andrew in the least…he just pushed a bit more right rudder and then we took off. He was super relaxed the entire flight actually which was really nice. If he had freaked out on that take off, the rest of the flight probably would have been pretty shitty.
It was a little disorienting since I was used to taking off the other way. I didn’t really know the land marks going this way. Or at least I didn’t think that I did. Turns out I actually did know them, we basically headed out to the practice area the way we normally come in from there.
Once we got out to the practice area Andrew showed me a sprial dive and a recovery. The he put the plane into another dive and got me to recover. No big deal, I recovered with no problems and Andrew seemed pleased. So…he decided to put us into a more serious spiral and let me recover. No worries, recovered without any problems. He seemed satisfied with that we we moved onto practicing slips.
We did some side slips, both to the left and to the right, and we also did some forward slips. He showed me how the airspeed indicator doesn’t work properly during the slips due to the way the plane is actually flying.
We headed back in over BC and joined the downwind leg of the circuit for runway 32. We were cleared for a long landing (without even asking for it) which meant we were allowed to land more than half way down the runway, since we really didn’t need all 10000 feet of it. After turning for final we were a bit high so we did a forward slip to lose some altitude. I tell ya, landing on the big runway is WAY different, it is soo much wider (and longer of course) and it’s a bit more difficult to figure out where to flare. Or at least it was for me. I flared a bit too soon, and pulled back a bit too much. No worries though, we touched down with no issues.
Taxied back to the club (via Alpha, Quebec and Tango taxiways) and parked the plane. Then we headed inside and I talked to Andrew about the flight. All in all not bad. He recommended that I start flying the circuit on my next lesson and if I really wanted to do some spins that we could do those before the pre-solo test.
Before I left I booked another lesson with Brad for tomorrow at 14:00.