Saturday, September 08, 2018

Flying - A Nice Little Practice Flight

So yesterday afternoon, after a very long week it was time to leave the surly bonds of earth.

Peter had just joined the same flying club and since he had never flown a Piper before I had arranged to take him up again before his checkout with the club's CFI.

We did a comprehensive preflight as usual and I had home do it and showed him the differences between the Archer and the Cessna. Pretty easy stuf with minor differences only.

I flew the left seat as I was not comfortable in the right, am not an instructor and no point pushing thing.

The wind was light out of the north eastand we did the run up and I showed him each step and we took off from Runway 9L and headed northeast.

Once at a reasonable altitude I let him fly it around and he had no problems, but remarked flying from the right seat felt weird.

I then went through the procedures and demonstrated slow flight, power off, and power on stalls and steep turns. As usual, my steep turns sucked -- I need to practice those more and haven't been doing these maneuvers much lately. We then did turns around a point. I also showed how the Garmin 430 has a message reminder to change fuel tanks and showed how that works.

Then we headed back to Pontiac.

We initially received instructions to enter the downwind for 9L and I was setting up for that and ready to show him each phase of the pattern for landing in an Archer.

Then another controller came on and said "28S, I've got no one in the pattern right now and winds are straight out of the north, would you like to land on 27R?"

Why not? I said sure, and she said that would be more efficient as I was closer to the approach for 27R and no point having to fly along the runway to go to 9L at that moment. Very kind of her, and she's always a cheerful and helpful controller.

So a slight angle and then a straight in approach for 27R it was.

Not by best landing in the world, but still reasonably smooth.

We then headed back to the hangar and we then got some fuel to get the tanks filled back to tabs and then I showed him how we put the plane away and we used the winch, which is happy making and best hauling the plane uphill into the hangar. We then washed all the bugs off the leading edges and were done. I figure his checkout will go a fair bit smoother now that he's more familiar with the plane.

A nice relaxing .9 and 1 landing.

4 comments:

Old NFO said...

Landings, like trigger time, need to be done on a regular basis... :-)

drjim said...

Takeoffs are optional, and landings are MANDATORY!

Or so my Instructor told me decades ago.....

Unknown said...

RE: flying from the right seat. This reminds me of a comment made by William Langwiesche, that he was not comfortable in the sky until around 3,000 hours. I made it in about 600 hours, flying in some real crummy weather too not because I had to but because I wanted to. I had bought a Cherokee and flew often. Rarely did I stick around the airport, heck, I usually went across a state or two in a single flight.

And I practiced maneuvers aiming for PTS standards every time. Once I flew fifty miles making Lazy 8's while on a $100 burger run. And my every T.O. and landing was max perf. About the last 300 of that 600 hours was flown exclusively from the right seat. Push yourself is the mantra.

Clubs can offer wonder opportunities. Take that club plane and fly across whole regions.

Sorry that this seems like its all about me. That is not my intention.

Aaron said...

Old NFO: That's for sure, especially those with sudden changes in landing direction!

drjim: Yes the number of takeoffs and landings should be equal.

Unknown: More practice always helps and I realized I hadn't been doing steep turns much if at all. Still at the ragged edge of ACS standards but I need to work on them. Always good to strive fr improvement.