Sunday, July 09, 2017

Flying Lesson #137 - More Getting Lost and Found

It was a nice sunny day today and I headed out of Pontiac with Tiffany. The airport was all sorts of busy today with lot of traffic.

I let ground know we would head to the northeast.

I then navigated us to Romeo and did a short field landing there on Runway 18.

Then I did some steep turns and Tiffany had me do some unusual attitudes, which were fun and I handled very well.

Unusual attitudes start with your eyes closed and chin on your chest while the instructor banks and pitches the plane around to make you lose situational awareness and reference to what the plane is actually doing and then says "Your Controls".

You then need to quickly figure out what she just did to your aircraft and get it back to stable and level.

It's always fun opening your eyes and seeing the ground rushing to meet you, or seeing nothing but blue sky and seeing the airspeed indicator start to unwind as the altimeter goes up. No big deal to fix it in either case and fix it I did. Like I said, fun.

Then I did lost procedures and did ye olde climbing circle to get my bearings and then found where I was and navigated back to Pontiac.

I then came in and did a soft field landing that felt like it would take forever to get down - the hot air really kept us floating for what felt like forever, but it was a nice soft touchdown.

Then we did some pattern work with power off 180s each time. the first two times I was floating so much that I was going past the 1000 foot markers so we did some go-rounds. On the third time I figured out to extend the downwind more and then turn in and got it ok. Then I did it again and that was Lesson 137.

1.5 and 4 landings.

2 comments:

MrGarabaldi said...

Hey Aaron;

Have you solo'ed yet and when are you going to take the kids up with you?

Aaron said...

Yep, I've got about 13 hours solo in. I can't take the kids up until I get the private pilot certificate, and since this whole experience seems to be a running joke, time for that is still indeterminate.