Flight Review Done, Complete With Some Extra Excitement

Sunday, July 28, 2024

Flight Review Done, Complete With Some Extra Excitement

Had my Flight Review yesterday.

Required every two years, you need to go out with an instructor and show you can fly. It's basically an abbreviated reenactment of your Private Pilot Test. It has opportunities to both correct issues that may have cropped up in your flying, and to learn more stuff, so it is worth doing.

I had Brian, our flying club maintenance officer who is also a CFI do the review with me yesterday.

We were taking out the Archer and the prior pilots, who had flown to Oshkosh on Friday reported the Ammeter gauge was showing zero and not being responsive both on the way there an back. Prior to our flight review Brian had tested it out and couldn't duplicate it. More on this later.

So we started with the ground portion and he quizzed me on basic airspace, the items required for a pilot and aircraft to be legal and other useful stuff such as personal limits, issues in flight etc, and the current bugbear around Pontiac - making sure you don;t have a runway incursion as too many students have recently been doing their best to land on the wrong runway here. He was quite satisfied that I knew my stuff and noted a lot of pilots forget a lot of it right after the test. So the ground portion was no problem and I apparently know my stuff. I also learned some new things, so it was worth it.

For the flight part, he stated we'd be doing dead-reckoning without using the GPS, just like on the private pilot exam. We'd be heading to Linden. This was shades of my private pilot exam as that was the same route for it. He was happy that I knew Linden was under Flint's Class Charlie airspace so we'd need to be under 2,000 feet when we got near there.

So I did the run up and again, the ammeter gauge worked just fine, no issues at all. You might guess where this is going to go.....

I did a decent job using dead reckoning and the sectional chart and we made it to Linden, and I did an ok and decent pattern entry and a nice if somewhat long-ish landing due to some fun crosswinds that had whipped up. All good, but it did show I've been focusing on doing IFR stuff and approaches and neglecting VFR pattern flying so that's something I should be working on. We then did a bit more pattern work at Linden and headed back to Pontiac, on the way doing steep turns and stalls.

Since the Archer now has the GFC500 installed, the plane automatically activated the autopilot during the stall and forced a recovery, which was kinda neat. It also was not a fan of very step turns again sounding an alarm. Neat to see the protective mode of the autopilot system works. We turned the protective mode off and did the stalls to spec, and then put it back on so the next pilot wouldn't be surprised by a lack of the protective mode being on. It works and it doesn't like you putting the plane into a bad spot.

Just for fun, we played with the autopilot a bit and Brian showed me a few neat techniques that answered some questions I had about the autopilot and its quirks with altitude settings. I now know how to handle those quirks better and that makes it even easier to use.

Then, as we were heading back, not only did the ammeter got to zero but the alternator warning light lit up.

So we shed all unnecessary power consumption, shutting down radio 2, the landing light, fuel pump, autopilot. Basically we were trying to avoid losing the radio and power before we made it in.

We then booked it back to Pontiac at full throttle and got in the pattern rather fast we got a landing clearance and zipped in to make it happen but had to stay high as we had to do a long downwind for spacing. Brian then took the controls to show a really full-tilt, high-speed, side-slip to drop altitude real fast to get us down quick and line up on the runway at the same time, which was fun. A rather long landing as we had a fair bit of speed to spare but we got it down very nicely.

So, we got down fine, and never lost electrical power, and after taxiing to the hangar we checked and the battery still had 12 volts and hadn't been fried. So, he's going to see what the issue may be and so far the suspect is a loose connection somewhere on the alternator circuit.