Not a bad lesson, and I learned lots. Today was an all pattern day, complete with a shifty and gusting cross-wind.
I did more work on forward slips to landing with a crosswind. Most were good, but I had one with a lousy setup into the slip where I was descending too fast necessitating a go-round, but otherwise they were ok. Not sure I'm completely comfortable with it yet nor ready to do this maneuver solo as it just still feels weird and the landing sight picture feels really off even when its actually perfect.
Ray also demonstrated that you can land a Cessna 172 without flaps and without using a forward slip, and that you can stop it without brakes. Basically he controlled descent speed only via trim, pitch and power and did a perfect landing without any flaps, and then used aerodynamic braking to bring the plane to a halt without touching the brakes.
He thinks I'm feeling a bit off as I'm used to flaps and need to get used to the idea of both not using flaps and heavily cross-controlling an airplane after plenty of hours where the lesson has been drilled into me to not to cross-control the plane.
So, not a breakthrough lesson by any means, just more slogging forward, but it's coming along and I still have lots to work on.
That's another 1.2 hours and 11 more landings.
3 comments:
On Cessnas, if you're doing a preflight away from your home field, don't drop the flaps more than 10deg. Should the flap motor then fail, you can fly back with that. Might be not be fun, keeping it in the white arc, but you can get back.
Not really so if you drop them to 30 (or 40) degrees and the motor quits.
Very good advice, thanks.
A few years back, my home field had an unfortunate demonstration of what happens when you try to takeoff in a 172 with 40 degrees of flap - it did not end well.
My A&P showed me where the access plates were to allow a pilot to get at the flap motor and raise the flaps by hand via endless revolutions of a wrench if need be. Supposedly takes forever, but if you have to get home...
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