Flying - A Beautiful Day For A Flight Review

Every two years as a pilot, you have to (there's some exceptions, but you might as well do it) have a flight review with an instructor to make sure you're still a safe pilot, know the rules etc.

So this morning I headed out to Pontiac airport to get it done.

The club has some flight instructors and I had arranged with one, Joe, to have the review done.

We met at the hangar and did some ground review, touching on airspace, general aviation security and various other regulations and requirements for legal flying. He had also requested that I plan flight to KTVC and he liked how I did the flight planning. I'm happy to say I passed the ground part easily and learned some useful new stuff on the way.

On to the flying part.

I did my normal preflight and run up and we took off and headed to the northeast.

Once there, he had me do some power off and power on stalls. The power on stalls required the yoke held all the way back to finally get it to stall. This cold air gives some great performance but tends to make it hard to do a power on stall as the plane just doesn't want to stall until you get to a crazy nose-high angle of attack.

I did excellent recoveries for all the stalls and Joe was happy.

Then on to steep turns and he showed me a neat trick: Begin the turn, add a bit of power and two full rolls of trim and then the Archer will fly itself through the steep turn. Yep, I could be hands off the controls in a perfect 45-degree steep turn, no fuss, no muss.

That was fun.

Then back to Pontiac for some landings.

Wind was gusting a 7-12 knots out of 10-70 degrees or so, and as such we would be landing on Runway 9L. Of course I'm used to the 27R side so the sight picture was a tad different. The pattern was also packed and it was hard to get a word in edgewise on the radio.

First landing was fine, then into the pattern for more.

On the second landing we did a go-round as a huge gust caught me right as I flared so a go round it was. Joe was planning to give me a go round anyways and this one just happened to be required.

Next couple landings were decent as was the final and fourth one.

I've done better landings but they were serviceable and I could use the plane again, and Juvat's Navy instructor pilot would have liked the last two. Landings in gust crosswinds is something I can work on and improve anyways.

I officially passed my flight review, and am good to go on that score and legal to fly for the next two years.

That's 1.5 and 4 landings.