Had two lessons booked for this weekend, hoping for the best – but planning for the worst, that maybe one would get cancelled (winter has hit the UK late, but hit it has…).

Sure enough on arrival to the club Saturday afternoon, I was promptly told to “Go home…”  followed by “…..you can stay, have a coffee if you want, but it’s not going to get any better.”   Who am I to argue with that?   I’m far from at a point where I can accurately predict the gods of weather by glancing at the sky.

Just as I was accepting the fact I would be staying firmly on the ground, the admin staff told me there was a slight issue with my Sunday lesson – oh great, now what!

Turned out the club needed to get the Extra 200 over to Sywell (where it is maintained), but to get it there an instructor would have to follow in a Cessna in order to bring the Extra pilot home again…….would I like to go with?   It’s not far away, but it would still have been my first fly away to another aerodrome and the opportunity was there to fly in either the Extra or the Cessna.  Bad luck on the weather was turning into a very good day indeed.

It all hinged on getting the visibility.

……and sadly it was not to be.

I woke up to low clouds, probability of rain and 2km visibility 🙁    It never got much better and at 1:30pm the phone rang to bring the bad news, the trip was off, there was no hope of getting the weather today.

EGSC at 10am on 12th Feb. 2012

A massive disappointment, but what can you do……..except book a few more lessons and hope for the best.   Fingers crossed for next weekend then 🙂

Aerial Photo of the Airport - Generally the circuit area

If you can’t go flying at Christmas, then the start of the new year, just before going back to work is the next best thing…….and this lesson would turn out to be a very good one indeed!

I’d phoned ahead to see who I’d be flying with, after a run of flying with new instructors I was keen to be flyng with someone I’d flown with before and thankfully this was the case.

Briefing

Generally already covered in my previous post, but to sumerise the objective was to essentially do laps of the airport.   There’s a lot going on inside the circuit:   pre-landing checks, radio calls, other planes to watch out for and of course the task of setting the plane up for landing etc.

My instructor on this lesson, I’ve found, likes doing things accurately and by the numbers – I can’t really describe how that’s different from any other instructor – but you just get a sense of “precision is key – we’ll go no further until I’m happy you’re accurate” (some other instructors lean towards chucking you in closer to the deepend and seeing how far you get).

This desire for precision was pressed home in the briefing with the statement of “You’ll fly to downwind and I’ll do the rest until I’m satisfied you’re doing that right.” At which point in my mind I concluded this lesson was destined to be one broken up into multiple lessons (e.g. Take off & Downwind / Base Leg / Final).

Still we’d see how the gods of flight felt today, to my instructors credit you never feel like you’re getting held back or wasting your time – he talks with a reassuring confidence that you are going to get it and soon be on your way.

So the initial plan:   I’d do the take-off, crosswind and turn to down wind section – he’d take over and do the rest, then as things got tidier I’d fly more and more of the circuit.

Plane Checkout / Taxi

G-SHWK

Todays plane:  G-SHWK, still had a broken port-side navigation light, but other than that looking like it’s normal tip-top form.   The tyres perhaps starting to look like they’ve seen better days, but it’s only just landed with my instructor, so I’m happy if he’s happy.

20 Gallons in the right tank, 15 in the left – the wind is picking up and I know in my mind that if it gets much higher there’s a risk we’ll be bailing on this lesson sooner then I’d like.

The tower sound like they’re in good spirits today (excellent news, because by the time we’re done with them, “Golf Wiskey Kilo” is going to be a sound they’re sick of hearing).

During the power into wind checks, the parking brake decides it’s not actually fully on and the plane rolls fowards – a quick jump on the toe brakes and we’ll try pulling a bit harder on the brake leaver shall we

As we get our departure clearance, we’re ushered to get on with it, so my instructor takes the controls to get us lined up quickly…..

Take Off

The second we’re lined up “You have control…..” giving me the green light to get on with getting us off this soon to be shared stip of tarmac.

Throttle open, quite a bit if rudder work to keep it straight today due largely to the wind, the airspeed indicator comes alive and in no time at all: 55 knots, time to rotate (collective opinion does indeed seem to be 55).

As we take off, I get reminded to level the nose to allow me to see how good/bad a job of flying straight I’m doing and to aid in bringing the speed up to 80 knots before pitching it properly into a climb.

Second thing I’m reminded of is to keep my hand on the throttle incase it slips (taking my hand off is something I tend to do, it’s almost instinctual to want your hands on the control column)

200ft :  After Landing Checks:

1. Flaps :  Up
2. Engine: Temperature & Pressures in the Green
3. Landing Light :  ON, we’ll be leaving it there because in 5 minutes we’ll be landing again 🙂

Circuit #1

500ft :

1. Nothing on our right
2. Nothing on our left
3. Begin the turn at 20 degrees (and no more) bank to the left, climbing to a 1000ft (circuit height)

I’ve posted before that my first climb of the day is notoriously rubbish (tendancy to overshoot) and this climb is no exception, we overshoot by 150/200ft.   Still nothing you can’t fix with a little less power.

The turn on to downwind was fine – followed by my instructors taking over the controls.

He does the radio call and then sets us up on the approach to show what the perspective should look like, when done right.

Circuit #2

No sooner than touching down:  “You have control”, he’s raised the flaps already so it’s on with full power, holding it straight and it’s only a matter of seconds before we’re back in the air.

I still forget to keep my hand on the throttle, arrrgh.

After take-off checks are faster, the climb is much better this time and we level out a lot closer to the money – all round just better, nerves and such like have begun to settle a bit as well.

I get to do the radio call and response before handing controls back to my instructor.

This time he demonstrates a “to low” approach, we descend to 400ft on the base leg (putting us about 200ft lower then we should ideally be at for this point).   It gives a good indication of how ‘flat’ the runway perspective becomes when you’re low.

Cambridge Airport has the added advantage of a Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI) – essentially 4 lights angled so that at 3 degrees (glide slope for jets) you should have 2 red and 2 white, if you’re high you’ll get more white, to low – more red.   For light aircraft though, you want something around 3 white, 1 red (a touch high relative to 3 degrees)…… I’ve read online others argueing that you should fly the glideslope (3 degrees), perhaps it’s a topic of debate among instructors, my instructor says 3 degrees is “not us” so I’m going with that – I’m not here to argue with an instructor unless I feel they’re endangering my safety and two things make you safe in an airplane:   Height and Airspeed – so I’ve no problem approaching with a little bit of height on my side.

We touch down, my instructor raises the flaps and hands control back to me for the take-off.

Circuit #3

By this point I’m feeling much more into the rhythm, although on climb out I still take my hand off the throttle (only to be reminded by a vigilant instructor…..).   I remove my mental post-it note to keep my hand on the throttle and replace it with an engraved note written in tablets of stone – we won’t be doing that again!

But the climb out is good, 200ft the check list is more like an instinct then a thought process – which is good, checklists are easy to memorise, but try recalling them while flying, with background noise and no time.

Turning climb up to circuit height is really good, 1000ft give or take 20-50ft.

On downwind my instructor asks me to go through the before-landing checklist:  Brakes, Mixture, Fuel, Hatches, Harnesses, Autopilot.

But as we fly downwind there’s another plane just about to start final approach, this compromises our seperation if we were to keep going and turn on to the base leg.   Rather than extend the downwind leg, which as my instructor said would change the view of the approach I’d get which he didn’t want to do, he radioed the tower to request permission to do a right orbit (360 degree turn).   This would buy the other plane some time and when we completed the orbit we’d be back on the downwind leg pretty much where we’d started.

This time my instructor holds off taking off the power on the base leg, keeping us high, we come in at around 800ft.   The PAPI is all white and visually we’re clearly well above the correct runway perspective – rather than approach it, you feel like you’re going to have to drop onto it.

On touch down my instructor calls “You have Control”, I accept control, glance at the flaps and realise he’s not raised them – so I reach over, raise the flaps and then put on full power to get us back up.

Circuit #4

This time my take-off is good, the climb up to circuit height is good the checks are all pretty smooth.

Turning on to downwind I’m asked to do the radio call to announce our intention:

“Golf Wiskey Kilo, downwind for Touch and Go”

“Golf Wiskey Kilo, report final.”

“Wilco, Golf Wiskey Kilo”

Simple as that, the last one is just an abbreviation for “Will Comply”

On the base leg I’ve been making mental notes of where to start taking off the power, position of the runway etc.   This time I get to do the turn on to the base leg and start putting the notes into action.

My instructor flys the final approach.

From almost the moment we touch down it’s all over to me – all that’s left in the list of things I haven’t done now, is land it.

Circuit #5

By this point getting the plane up and on to the downwind leg is pretty much a given activity – but I keep reading out what I’m doing or about to do just to ensure my instructor feels like it’s under control.

The downwind checklists and radio calls are all over to me, and they go nice.

Turning on to the base leg, pretty soon it’s time to take off the power, lower the flaps to 20 degrees and bring the plane down to 600ft.   All of this goes off without any issues.

One last turn on to final, but this time I’m flying it down the approach – aiming to keep the runway roughly “1 fist above the instrument panel”.   300ft, it’s going well, 200ft still lined up give or take, a bit of rudder just to keep it from being blown off course but generally still looking good.   100ft, 50ft…..I hear my instructor say “now fly it down the runway, then begin to flare”.    A firm but by no way unhappy thump of the main landing wheels hitting the runway suggest we’re down – I lower the nose wheel on to the runway and my instructor says the words I’ve spent a lot of hours waiting to hear

Congratulations you’ve just done your first landing.

No time to celebrate though, we’re doing a touch and go and currently have the flaps down and are doing 20-30knots down the runway.    Time to focus on getting back in the air!!

Circuit #6 – Final for Landing

Excitement / Addrenalin can do some fun things to your head, getting the airplane back in the sky was no problem.   However, no matter how much I kept thinking “focus on flying….” and trying to hush the noise of “wasn’t that a good landing!” going off in my mind.   It kept coming back and the net result was that I found myself staring at the altimeter going “hmmm this climb is taking a while, only at 100ft……isn’t the altitude going up slow.”   All while holding an airspeed of 80knots and plane nose pointing skyward!

At 200ft I should have been doing after take-off checks, at 500ft I should have been turning on to the crosswind leg…….but I kept looking at the dial and it was just creeping towards “1”.

“So are you goin to turn then?”   Came the voice of my instructor.   That snapped me out of it, I looked back at the altimeter to work out what he meant – oh the altimeter was creeping for sure, creeping towards 1000ft, not 100!   It currently read 600ft.

If you ever wanted to know “how did that pilot not realise he was losing airspeed….or wasn’t climbing….or made mistake X, Y, Z….”    I’ve just had a master class in how the brain can merily wonder off and stop making sense of the information before it.

Everything from here on in went smooth though, nice radio calls, good turns, a nice flight down to 600ft without any real overshoot on the turn on to final.

To the best of my memory the radio call to land was mine, but with the excitement of “I’m going to land this again….” and everything else, I’ve susequently forgotten who did what.

Touching down spot on the centre, this was as good a landing as I’ve ever been in before.   Smooth, just past the numbers and centred….. all that and I can walk away from it.    A good landing by all measures.

Debriefing

Nothing much to note, no concerns on my flying, the usual odd note on ‘try to remember….’  But all in all, a good days flying with a lot more achieved then I’d first expected to get done on this lesson.

After many hours / lessons though, it’s nice to now be doing all phases of flying (Take-Off, Climb, Cruise, Descent, Landing).    Perfect all of the above and then throw in some navigation…..

G-SHWK

Upon arrival to the aero club, it had all changed. The club has just taken over responsibility for all general aviation at the airport so it needed to expand, up its admin staff by 100%, fit some new planning desks etc. It’s all looking very professional now, most importantly you no longer need to be ‘buzzed in’ on the front door.

As if the layout changing wasn’t enough, I’d be flying with yet another instructor I’ve never flown with before, but this time an instructor new to the club as well.

Considering the UK weather has been rapidly descending into winter and has generally been rubbish all week, it was now blue skies and very little wind. Good news because to get this phase of the training signed off, I needed 3,000ft.

Briefing & Plane Checkout

Flying G-SHWK, and as the instructor was new and we’d never flown together, the briefing was done over coffee and compared to some, was very thorough in trying to thrash out if I had any theoretical weaknesses before we went flying. Generally it seemed fine, I think I convinced the instructor I knew enough to be comfortable flying with me and we weren’t going to have any awkward “you should know that” moments in the air etc.

This lesson was to sign off the last of my stalling configurations and primarily focused on stalls in the approach & landing configurations (20 degrees flaps and flaps fully down).

As always I’d do the checkout, but as the instructor was new and normally flew a different aeroplane then a Cessna 172SP, she’d be coming out pretty soon after doing the paperwork to look at what I was up to and have a look over the plane for herself.

I noticed the port (left) navigation light was broken, made a note of it and reported it to my instructor – you don’t need it to legally fly in the day, but Whiskey Kilo is used at night at this time of year (I’ve flown it at night). So I wanted to make sure the next night flight had a chance of not getting cancelled because nobody had reported it sooner then their checkout etc.

Spilling Avgas on your hand is no fun in the cold, especially in December (as the fuel evaporates pretty quick and takes the heat from your hand with it, making your hand feel even colder), I could have lived without doing that, but it happens.

Taxi (Avoiding the C-130’s)

New instructors make me screw things up that I’ve had down to a fine art for weeks, I call it “New Instructor Syndrome”. This new instructor was about to prove I suffer from it, again.

Having said I was happy to do the radio, with an instructor who knew me I’d have just gone for it and pressed the transmit button. As we’d never flown together I thought I’d give a little practice run so she felt happy (you’re legally only allowed to use the radio at this stage, becase your instructor is permitting it).

“I’m going to say…………..”

“Errrrm”

“I dunno what I’m going to say.”

Absolute and total mind blackout, my brain had just disengaged. I couldn’t remember it was a Tower I’d be calling, I couldn’t think to say who we were. It was just rubbish basically – in my defence, better to be rubbish off-air, get your act together and then talk sense on-air.

Having got my act together, I radioed our taxi request and because New Instructor Syndrome applies to all things on the ground, the tower came back with a really random request to:

“Taxi between light aircraft, to holding point Bravo, via the grass-way.”

You want me to go where? There’s a grass taxiway? Where’s that then? Now on a normal new instructor day, my instructor would be all knowing of the airport and we’d be off, today I didn’t know and my instructor didn’t know either…….but we figured we’d be able to figure it out and in her words “They’ll tell us if we go to far wrong.”

I don’t think we taxi’d between the correct set of light aircraft, but we went between some and then spotted the grass taxiway – nothing a hard right turn couldn’t fix. We must have been doing ok, because the next ATC call was to another plane to “Follow the Cessna….” Unbeknown to them, me and my instructor were saying “No don’t follow us!!”

The cause for this new and scenic taxi route was because holding point Alpha was having a Galaxy C-130 ‘convension’, there were 2 of them parked up there (they’re far from small planes!).

It was a nice enough taxi, and we’d gone far to long without new instructor syndrome striking.

Take Off

Before take-off you do several things, one of them is a briefing which I’ve just started on (up to this point I’ve assumed me giving the briefing would be fairly pointless because it would go something like “I’ll take off, if it goes wrong, if you could get us down without us dying that’d be great…”). However, this time my instructor basically told me I’d be doing the take off, if it goes wrong on the runway, they expect me to get it stopped and if it goes wrong before 1000ft, they’d expect me to find a field. Ahh such confidence, the reality is I’ve never landed on the runway, so I think they’d be in for an interesting time at the board of enquiries if they let my first landing be an emergency one!

Air Traffic Control continued to cause me grief, on the call declaring us ready for departure, they came back with “Traffic crossing downwind is Cessna, lineup on runway, clear for takeoff.”

The combination of traffic and the lineup threw me completely, I concluded I’d play it safe and called back that I was holding at Bravo……not the right call back at all. Air Traffic came back and repeated their statement of line up on the runway. They’ve never told me to lineup before and they don’t normally give you take-off clearance when they know you’ll go into traffic. Still with a glance at my instructor for this all being fine, I called back we were lining up and we were clear for take off.

Upon lining up on the centre line I could see the silhouette of a Cessna 172SP at 1000ft just crossing the runway takeoff line.

This instructor had told me to do the take off differently to how I’ve normally been instructed to do it (another reason I’m not a fan of constantly changing instructors). For this one, I’d hold the plane on its toe brakes, set 2000RPM and release the brakes and on with full power.

…….done this way, you take off more like a rocket ship then the progressive speed-up you’d get my normal way. Nothing, then power & speed!! How good is this for the brakes? I’ve no idea (can’t really be good for them can it), to be discussed with the next instructor who flys with me. From a personal perspective, this was a more fun way to take off.

The take-off went nice, very smooth, 80 knots climb, give or take a couple of knots this was an on the money climb – no drifting, head up, glancing at the instruments. I couldn’t have done it better, my instructor seemed pretty happy with it and New Instructor Syndrome was left back on the ground.

Contacting Approach

The radio work to date for me has stopped once we’ve left the ground, but since my last lesson I have wanted to do more. Today my instructor seemed to be keen for me have a go at it all, I handed off from the Tower, change frequency on the radio for Approach and for the first time made a call to approach to introduce ourselfs and request a basic service.

Stalling & Lots of Turning

A practice FREDA check, and then we were pretty quickly approaching Grafham water, where we do a lot of flying – it’s mostly fields below so a good place to do stalls (outside of active airspace, not in a built up area etc. – ticks the box for the Location part of HASELL/HELL checks).

From 3,500ft I went into a 360 degree turn, at 30 degrees of bank to the left. By the end of it we were at pretty much the same altitude we started, always a good sign of the turn (esp. 360 turns as they take a while to complete, so if you don’t watch your back-pressure you’ll loose some height typically).

Reduced speed to 1800 Rpm for 80 knots, then down with two stages of flaps and into a routine of pulling back on the controls, pulling back a lot more and more and more some more……before finally at somewhere around the 40 knot mark, a fairly quiet ‘uuurrrrrrr’ from the stall warner. Down went the nose and then into a recovery of pushing the control column forward, unstalling the wings, bit of rudder to correct the yaw that was developing, level the wings and on with the power, upon attaining positive climb up with the flaps before reaching VFE (all in about 3-5 seconds).

Leveling out and bringing the power back to cruise, I’m informed it was a nice recovery but perhaps could be a bit quicker. So as this instructor seems more keen to do full lookouts, it was back into a turn, but this time two 180 degree turns.

Before repeating the exercise above again, seemed good enough so we moved on.

Next was to put all the flap on (30 degrees) and then stall it and remove the flaps in stages. My instructor did one to demonstrate the stages.

Controls were handed back to me, with the plane out of trim (instructors like to do this), I was asked to re-trim it for 70 knots straight and level and then once I was happy it was trimmed to let them know and then we’d do a HELL check.

The “H” in HELL is for Height, and at this point we didn’t have enough of it, as I pointed out we were now at 2900ft. So full power on and into a climb – good example of why you want to check your height as when repeatedly doing manouvers like this you tend to lose height.

Leveling off around 3,500ft, another set of two 180 degree turns then pulling the power back to 1500 RPM, trim for slow flight and then down with the flaps in two stages, re-trimming once down. Then it was back into the task of pulling the nose up to beginning to stall it.

But the difference with this exercise is that you don’t stall it, but recover on the first sign of the stall. The idea being you’re in the configuration you’d be roughly in for the base/final legs of a circuit and need to be able to spot the signs of a stall and recover it before it occurs.

In my case I used the stall warner as the first sign, but if the planes wings had started to buffet first I’d have gone on that or similar first signs.

Upon hearing the stall warner go, it was down with the control column, up with the first stage of flap, on with the power, wait for positive rate of climb and then up with the next stage of flap before finally removing all the flap.

Leveling off, it had felt fairly calm, but a bit clunky in the overall execution. So a quick HELL check (including another full turn for lookout) and it was time to do it all again to iron it all out.

Not so much better in anyway, but just more fluent on the second run.

The instructor seemed happy enough with my stalls, recoveries and general flying (with some good comments on my turns). Time to head for home as we’d been up for what seemed like a long time.

Heading for Home, More Radio Work & Learning the area

As we began making the run back to home, my instructor double checked with me what I thought the city in front of us was – I’m so use to flying with instructors that do this daily and know the area better then the birds. This was a mini eureka moment though, because I found I instinctively turned to look behind me to sanity check where Grafham water was and upon spotting it, that confirmed that if that was behind us, then Cambridge was the city ahead of us. This logical deduction all came out on the intercom as if I knew what I was doing………the small moments like this are the ones that make you feel good.

The instructor said the club encouraged calling in at 5nm from the airport and we were approaching a village 5 miles out, so time to call in: did I want to do it?

There’s only one way to get better at something and that’s practice, so I responded I’d be happy to give it ago.

This was followed by “do you want to request entry to the circuit” and again, there’s not much point saying no – got to get into the habit of doing these calls………all good until they asked if I wanted to accept a right base entry to the circuit? I dunno, do I want to accept that? – I knew what they meant, but whether we were happy with it I left to my instructor to reply.

All in though on this single flight I think I quadrupled the number of radio calls I’d made and blackout at the start aside (which was off-air thankfully), they were all ok.

Descending to circuit height of 1000ft, the wind started to kick in and we were soon getting blown all over the place. My instructor let me do the usual routine of flying it down to around 100ft, reasonably well lined up before controls were handed back.

Upon landing control was handed back to me to taxi off the runway and my instructor said she was quite keen on the accuracy of following the yellow lines – we’d try, but at this airport, you tend to get “chased down” by 737’s, Learjets and Citations…….which makes you develop a habit of “get off the runway, get off immediately.”

Debrief

General summary was that she enjoyed the flight, my take off and climb was very nice (Yay, for once not getting told off for flying on instruments!), my turns were good – not gaining or losing altitude. The stalls were good but her one criticism would be I could perhaps be more forceful putting power back on and recovering faster (a repeat of the previous lessons comments really: Do it faster because for real you’ll be much lower). But all in all a very enjoyable flight.

Stalls are signed off……..next lesson Circuit Flying! (Many hours of flying have been spent looking forward to this phase of the course).

G-UFCB : Cessna 172SP

The aero club had a meet-up the other night, the second I’ve managed to make it to, a good night all round and another reason why flying at a club is more than just a formal training exercise.   I’m meeting more and more great people along the way.

Today the objective was to do really slow flying (45-50knots) and lots and lots of stalls in various configurations.   To get a feel of entry into a stall, the symptoms to watch out for and the correct way to recover should the stall develop.

Briefing

I’d be flying with an instructor I’ve flown with before, his day job is a commercial airline pilot so I enjoy flying with him as I feel I learn a lot.

Primarily the briefing was focused on checking I understood why a plane (in particular its wings) stalls:   The critical angle of attack of the wings has been exceeded. Various other factors on what will make a plane more likely to stall (such as banking the aircraft, having the flaps down…..) and the airspeed’s at which such things can be expected to begin to occur.

However, when it comes to airspeed, read the above italic statement again.   Stalling is not due to flying below a constant speed, but about exceeding the critical angle of attack of the wings for a given speed.    As such the angle of attack at which the plane stalls is relative to the speed you’re flying and the airflow you’ve got going over/under the wings.    Consequently you can stall at any speed.

In a Cessna 172SP though, the general rule is that with flaps up, wings level, it will stall around the 45knot mark.

A quick check I’d memorised my HASELL & HELL checks and we were on our way….

Plane Checkout

A conversation with the club administrator concluded there’d been some discussion in our absence and we’d be flying Charlie Bravo – I did ponder if my regular instructor was setting me up, because she knows Charlie Bravo does not like me much.

My opinion of Charlie Bravo was not much improved when I looked at the technical logs and saw it only had 4.5 hours of flying time left on it before it needed scheduled maintenance (So I’d take it 1 hour closer to the end its serviced life……..it was going to be in top form then!)

Twenty gallons in the left tank, Eighteen in the right and nothing else exciting to report beyond the fact that I could almost believe its throttle and mixture plungers had been replaced with shiny new ones (but more likely someone had just cleaned them).

Taxi and Take-Off

The taxi to the holding point was very smooth and very centred, either I’m getting better or Charlie Bravo was having a good day…….didn’t get told off for riding the brakes so I was at least getting that right for once!

In a strange way I think my night flight taxi improved my taxing, but it could just be a one off.

As we set up to finish the power checks into wind at the holding point another Cessna requested permission to taxi, nothing unusual except this time I knew the pilots voice!!    Very bizarre, we’d met at a previous club meeting night, she’d have been hearing my (thankfully good) taxi request, I could hear hers and she was about to hear if I stuffed up my request for take off clearance or not…….. It shouldn’t be strange, but not knowing the people who can hear your radio calls is one thing, knowing is something else.

After getting our clearance to take-off from runway 23, I got it roughly lined up straight and then on with full power, 65 knots, pull back on the yoke and it was up, up and into massive amounts of wind!

I mean properly all over the place wind, it was like flying a helicopter trying to keep the plane level and the airspeed at a constant 80 knots.    It was never going to be my best work, but the instructor left me to it so it can’t have been to far wrong.

Climbing to 3,500ft

The gusting wind continued up to 2,000-2,500ft.   After which we were above the worst of it and things became very nicely settled.

Tower Air Traffic Control call us to contact approach, this is all normal except this time my instructor looks at me and says “Do you want to do it….” In the spontaneousness of it all I bailed on the idea and let him handle the reply (I was busy flying a plane and nobody said anything about being able to do that radio call today  🙂 ……but I’m pleased it happened because it’s another step forward on the radio work).

I did a climbing turn to the west and kept us going up before leveling out around 3,500ft.

Slow flight

Backed the power right out and let the plane hold straight and level at around 55knots, this was a chance to play with the controls and get a feel for how much more sluggish everything becomes.

The other thing that strikes you on slow flight is the quietness, the engine is working so much less that it’s actually quite a peaceful background sound.

Stalling

This won’t be universally true, but from a straight and level cruise configuration – stalling a Cessna 172SP is a lot like hard work!   You have to get the airspeed right down, to do this you take out all the power, but doing this makes the nose want to naturally drop…….if you let it, it will pickup speed and you won’t stall, so you have to pull back on the yoke to keep the nose up, pull back some more, and some more and some more……

45-48Knots the stall warner horn begins to go off for the first time.

Pull back some more….

40-43knots, it stalls……..the left wing dips, the nose drops.

Resisting the temptation to correct the wing drop (using ailerons at this stage risks making the stall worse), I push forward on the control column let the speed come up to 72 and then correct the wings and climb out of the stall.

As simple as that, other then spending 3-4 seconds pointing at the ground, nothing much to it.   I didn’t look at our descent rate during the stall, due to being a bit busy recovering it, but I’d guess if I’d done nothing we could have pointed at the ground for 2.5-3 minutes before hitting it.

After recovery I was told it was a nice recovery, I’d not fallen to the temptation of applying aileron before unstalling the wings.

We did a few more stalls, and then started to use power to recover the stalls.   During the latter, I was told that while I was handling the plane nicely I was perhaps pointing at the ground for a bit longer then I needed to…….we did a few more to work on that.

Stalling with Flaps

If stalling a Cessna 172SP with wings level felt like hard work, stalling it with flaps was like trying to stab yourself in the hand with a needle  – you can do it, but to actually go through with it requires quite a lot of mental intent.

This is not because you don’t want to, but because the stall speed of a Cessna 172SP with the flaps down is ~30knots (you could get out and run as fast, though you’d probably fall faster then you ran if you tried….)

A quick 90 degree turn (at 30 degrees of bank) left, followed by a 90 right to check the area is good and a re-run of the HELL check, we’re good to go, very few planes are up today it seems.

Flaps down, wings level, all the power off…..lifting the nose, lifting the nose some more, still lifting the nose – unless you were to put on a ton of trim at this point the plane is so heavy you should know you’re doing something daft.  Still lifting the nose…..finally at around 35-40knots the stall warner goes, but the wings have not stalled, so still lifting the nose and wham the left wing drops like a brick, the nose follows it.

Some rudder, push the nose forward to unstall the wings, power on, as the wings unstall I climb away.

It’s not the fastest recovery and my instructor suggests that I’m still pointing the plane at the ground a bit longer then necessary.   I suspect this has something to do with visually not feeling threatened, I can see we’re pointing towards the ground, but I can also see I’m 3300ft up and have plenty of time – so instinctively I’m flowing out of the stall, rather then panicking out of it like you might do if you did this at three hundred feet.

We try a few more to try and get me to recover a touch faster, but that makes me start putting aileron on first – so now I’m swapping error for another.

We head out west again and do a load more stall and slow flight work, before finally my instructor takes the controls and demonstrates a Spiral Dive.   It’s about as ‘aerobatic’ as a Cessna can get (and as close to a Spin as you’re allowed to do), something for my next lesson.

Out of time I’m handed back the controls and we head for base.

Approach & Landing

With ATC permission we ‘sneak’ into the downwind leg of the circuit, I descended pretty fast to get us down to circuit flying height of 1000ft, just in time.

I make the turn on to the base leg, followed almost immediately by a turn on to final.    All the power off, flaps down, we’re descending from 1000ft at 70knots.

It’s insanely windy, my instructor has already told me he’ll do the landing, but for now I’m still flying the plane, 500ft, it’s all still nicely lined up the wind is insane at this altitude, but with a fair bit of right rudder on, we’re heading right for the runway numbers.   300ft, a touch low, a bit more power on to correct that and it’s back to looking fairly good…… at 150ft my instructor takes control, at this stage there was nothing wrong with the approach and I truly believe I could have landed the plane on that run.

Wouldn’t want to take all the fun out of it though, the official lesson on landing is within arms reach now (2-3 lessons depending on how they split it up), and this carrot on a stick temptation of being allowed to get the plane down to 100ft before the carrot is pulled away again is probably part of what keeps me coming back 🙂

Debrief

After taxing back to parking and shutting Charlie Bravo down, my instructor says my approach was very good.   He says I’ve got good grasp on slow flight, stalling and recovering and should be able to finish it all off in the next lesson without any problems.   The note on why recovering promptly is important is reiterated which is a fair comment.

All in all though, a very enjoyable lesson and given the wind, very pleased to have been able to get this done – the opportunities to get to 3,500ft to do this kind of exercise as winter approaches are going to get more and more limited.

Not so much a lesson, as an experience and a chance to just go flying and put a lot of what I’ve learnt to-date into practice (but at night!).

In the UK the night rating requires 5 hours of night flying and is dependant on a lot of the skills which essentially rule out doing it in parallel with a PPL.  However, where I fly the window to go flying at night exists from approx. first week of November to early in the new year.   So if I wanted to go flying at night, it was now or wait a year…..

Double checking with the aero club, the answer came back that I was good to go for at least the first lesson of the course (put an instructor in the right hand seat and the general rule of thumb is you can go an experience pretty much whatever – to the limits of your ability).

I’d flown only once with the instructor who’d be taking me up and to be honest it was my overall worst lesson (very windy and my flying was a bit all over the place in terms of accuracy), time to see if I’d improved any….

Briefing & Checkout

The briefing is best summed up like this:

The world will be divided up into two categories:   Very bright areas of light and Very Dark bits….. You won’t be able to see anything on the ground either way.    Should the engine fail, aim for a dark bit, you’ll have no idea if anything is there until around 100ft – turn the landing light on, if you don’t like what you see, turn the landing light off again!

It sounds like a joke, but it’s deadly serious the one thing that my instructor repeated was that night flying was dangerous.    The most dangerous phase of flying is taking off and all the way up to 1000ft – at this airport you have a few fields ahead that give you options, but at night you can’t see any of them……..if the engine fails on take off, it’ll be “best guess” approach for a field and a lot of praying!

All that said, the very last thing I am is scared of flying (day, night or upside down).   So I was far more excited about getting to go flying at night then I was worried about anything going wrong.

My instructor did the checkout of the plane, I suspect he wanted to be just as sure it was in top form and the plane was brimmed to the top with fuel (~20 gallons in each tank…….so about 4 hours of flying time).

Checklists at night

Escapism at its best, if you’ve ever imagined what it must have been like during world war 2 – then being in a cramped light aircraft with a red filtered torch searching for where you were on the checklist, switches & gauges brings the sensation truly home……. just going through the checks at night with a red filtered torch in hand was a lot of fun, I could have got the plane going, shut it down and I’d have still walked away smiling.

Take-Off and Climb

The radio calls were smooth and taxing gave the first ‘night phenomenon’, at night you’ll over speed on taxi if you keep looking forwards.  The tendency is to feel like you’re going quite slow (but turn your head left/right and you soon realise you’ve got more power on then you thought!).

My instructor did the take off and climb, for reasons highlighted above.

Calm Skies and Amazing Views

From 1000ft I was handed the controls and did a turning climb left up to 2,500ft.

There was very little wind and other than the beginnings of some pretty light haze/fog visibility was excellent at way beyond 10km.

I flew towards Newmarket, you know your ground speed is ~115mph, but it still seems to always amaze me how blisteringly fast you can cover distance in a light aircraft doing this speed (the reasons are obvious:  It’s direct point to point rather than following any roads and you’re outpacing even those who dare risk prosecution and drive beyond 100mph on the roads). This speed coupled with the fact that you can see 30-40 miles ahead of your position means that places are insight long before you reach them.

Everything my instructor had said on the ground was true.

The world was now very bright areas of light (towns/cities), or total black – perhaps it was a field, or perhaps there’s a house there and they’ve gone out for the night……if the engine cut out at this altitude, we’d have 5 minutes of gliding before we found out.

The views were still amazing though, you could watch major roads and see a sea of cars suddenly decide to start braking.

We turned and flew directly over Newmarket, now heading towards Bar Hill, keeping the A14 on my left (as per rules of the air for flying following a major feature).

There is a large Tesco (Superstore) at Bar Hill, from 2,500ft the one feature on the ground I could make out easily was its brightly lit sign.

Flying in a Blackout.

We were flying G-SHWK, it’s the only plane in the club that has a working autopilot (turned off) and a built in full colour display GPS (turned ON).   This made flying at night very simple, as knowing where we were was no problem at all……..but I knew in myself that if I turned that off, I’d be lost pretty damn quick.

As we reached Huntington, I turned the plane around an my instructor turned the GPS display OFF.   Now I had the A14 to follow and that was it, deviate from this major feature and very quickly I suspect I wouldn’t know one bright area of light from another (all villages look pretty similar at night).

Going back to my escapism of how it might have been for world war 2 bomber pilots, I was left thinking “How on earth did they ever find anything!”  (Now statistically you could argue they rarely ever did……forcing the use of daylight bombing raids for precision bombing).   However, I did find myself stopping and thinking a little about the dambuster crews and how on earth they ever managed to fine the damns!    A single navigation error and you’d have almost no hope of recovering.

It equally made me realise just how affective “blackouts” must have been, lit up a village/town/city was very easy to spot get over and thus hit…….but if the entire place collectively turned their lights off, forget it, you’d be dead reckoning to target and that’d be that, one black patch looked like the next even from 2,500ft (from 10,000ft I’d guess it would have been just total blackness generally).

Airports:   Invisible at night…..

Approach an airport at night and amongst a sea of bright yellow/white light, if you’re careful and know roughly where to look you’ll see an occasional flashing green beacon – but look carefully because amongst all the other light there’s a real chance you won’t see it.

Fantastic, that’s the airport…….now where’s the runway?

This was the most striking feature of the whole flight, you may have seen approaches on to runways before, they’re very well lit welcoming rows of lights showing you the entire path to touch down.    This is all true, so long as you’re lined up with the runway!

From any other direction, all those lights on the runway are basically invisible, at 2-5nm you’ll see them, but by this point you’re almost on top of the runway (if you’re 2 miles out, you’ll be there in 60 seconds and due to your altitude it’ll be practically directly below the plane visually).

Land or Touch and Go?

My instructor gave me an option, this would likely be my last night flight for a while, so I was in no rush to end the lesson:   Touch and Go.

I flew the circuit, lined up and handed over the controls.

My instructor did a very good landing, back on with the power, got us up to 1000ft and then handed the controls back to me.    I got to do the circuit and again line it up, flaps down, around 200ft handing the controls back.

We had a massive tailwind on the approach, even with the flaps down and all the power off, we were still coming in at 90knots (65knots it the typical landing speed).

But my instructor did another stella job of touching down and then it was over to me again to taxi us home and try and find the parking bay.

Overall:  Go try it!

If you’ve got enough hours under you to be able to fly straight and level, climb/descend & turn.   I’d recommend you nag a flight instructor near you to let you go for an experience of flying at night.

I truly enjoyed this lesson, almost all the flying was done by me and it was really enjoyable to not have a lesson where the objective was to learn X, but to actually just go and put what I knew into practice and go sightseeing.

There is masses I still have to learn, but the occasional “just for fun” lesson is really worth doing.

……..speaking of which, I’m starting to miss the Extra 200, thinking I’d seriously like to be back up in the clubs Extra maybe in January.