Ok, so we’re not talking about a ‘reverse gear’ or anything, but I was flying a plane backwards today! Talk about freaky!
Originally I was supposed to be doing the flight portion of my pre-flight test but the weather conditions were less than optimal (winds were forcasted at 34 knots at 3000 and the ceiling was supposed to be dropping to around 2000 feet) so Brad and I opted to just go out to the practice area and see just how windy it was.
After fighting the wind to get out there, Brad had me set up for slow flight pretty much right into the wind. I dropped down full flaps so I could fly as slow as possible. Sure enough when I got down around 40 to 45 knots the plane stopped going forward and started moving backwards across the ground. Talk about cool! I’ll tell you though, I definitely wouldn’t want to be doing a flight test in those conditions…you could be up there for hours if you had to fight the wind the whole time.
After my reverse flying adventure, Brad thought it would be fun to make me do a forced landing. I did ok, I made sure not to pick a field that was upwind of us! I forgot to say that I’d change the transponder to code 7700 though. Gotta remember that one.
We headed back after that. I grabbed the documents out of the plane and had a look at them while Brad had some breakfast. Since I was all studied up on aircraft documents there were no surprises.
It feels like the flight test just keeps getting farther and farther away. I just want to get it over with!
I booked a couple of timeslots for tomorrow during the day (11-2) and I may be able to do my Cornwall-Brockville cross country if the weather is good enough. If it’s not then I’ll be flying with Brad. Not sure what we’ll do.