Flying Lesson #96 - Cold Flight

So I arrived at KPTK and proceeded to do the preflight and scrape the frost of the leading edge of the wings, windshield etc.

Winter flying sucks.

Considering that N73455's cabin heater was putting out practically no heat at all, it sucked even more.

So after a run up and taking time to get the oil temperature to even show up on the gauge, we took off to the northeast and the practice area in Marginal VFR conditions. Considering every other scheduled flying lesson I had booked since the least one was cancelled due to weather we'd take the marginal visibility. In return for the cold and lousy viz we got nice stable air and we got excellent climbing performance, so its nice to have that.

After getting to the practice area I did slow flight again and Bob pointed out I need to look outside more. Apparently Ray had me too fixated on the instruments, especially the airspeed indicator. So we practiced that a fair bit and I did ok.

Next we did a power off stall and I did that just fine, complete with the descend 200 feet after full flaps are in before proceeding to pull the yoke back and stall the plane - this had not been taught to me previously but apparently its a required part of the maneuver now, or perhaps its always been so.

As we were freezing solid with -15 C on the outside temperature gauge and probably the same on the inside, Bob decided to call it and we headed back to KPTK, using a VFR back localizer approach to come in on 27L as the viz was quite bad. Bob had me fly to ERNST and then to the lineup for it. This was kinda interesting to experience. Once we had the runway in sight we switched to 27R for landing which I did, kind of flat-ish but at least mains first, and not as stabilized as I would of liked, but it good enough a landing. After tying the plane down and plugging in the oil heater back in we went inside and went over a few tips for landings and that was that.

1.0 and 1 landing.