Change of instructor again, I’m not convinced this constant changing of instructors is good for my flying.
This lesson was focused on flying straight and level but at different airspeeds, changing airspeed rapidly and also an element of practice and refinement from what was done in part 1.
We’d be flying G-HERC today.
The weather forecast had been for a glorious blue sky day, unfortunately when are they ever right? It had been blue sky at 10am, but now at 2pm it was massively overcast.
Plane Checkout
Other than the landing light not working, which I was reminded was not a legal requirement so didn’t matter (If I was being cynical if you’re not going to do anything about it, you could argue why is it on the checklist at all…..), the plane, being G-HERC, was in good order. As the clubs’ planes go, this is one of the best.
Pre-Flight Checks
Suffering again from New Instructor Syndrome, I picked a whole new set of stupid things to screw up – including a bizarre moment of having started the plane not letting go of the ignition key…….No I don’t know why either!
Getting quite tired of still not having the pre-flight stuff down to a formality. part of me wants to blame the format of the checklist, because it’s easy to lose your place. The other part of me feels like I need to spend 2 hours doing nothing but starting the plane up, pre-takeoff checking it, shutdown and repeat……repetition, repetition, repetition.
Unlike other instructors though, this time when I missed a step, I was 5 steps further along before the instructor spotted the miss. Either he expected me to have this sorted by now, or he had other things on his mind.
I did the radio call for taxi clearance.
Now I’m sure the tower abbreviated our call sign on their response (G-RC), and once they do, you can begin using the abbreviated version (but they must do it first). So I called back using an abbreviated call sign, which my instructor flagged me on for doing. I put up a small amount of defence that I thought they had abbreviated, he assured me they “never do on the first call.” That must be a house rule, because the book doesn’t say they can’t…… We’ll see, I have more lessons to check 🙂 Either way I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Flying at 2,500ft
Trimmed up at 2500ft: 100knots, 2300RPM.
We did some work dropping the power to 1900 RPM and flying at 80knots, trimming to hold straight and level and then back to 100 knots.
Normally I’m fine, but on this lesson I was typically overshooting my designated altitude by 150-200ft, not great. There was so much wind that getting it in trim was just a constant battle, needs a bit of work though.
The lesson was made a bit more frustrating by the fact that normally I’m allowed to do all the turns, my turning is fairly good and all instructors before have been happy to just give me a new heading and let me fly on to it. Today, on the grounds of allowing me to focus just on the task at hand, my instructor was doing the turns……. For my money this approach had no positive impact on the quality of my flying. It felt like doing the course by the numbers, instead of assessing where I was at and adjusting the lesson accordingly.
We moved on to a different type of changing airspeed, much more similar to how in a car if you wanted to get to a new speed as quick as possible, you might floor the accelerator and then back off as you approach the target speed. Same in a plane, to go from 80knots to 100knots, you can just open the throttle fully and then back it off as you approach 100knots.
The difference in a plane is that if you just put full power on, first the increase in torque and slipstream from the propeller will yaw the plane (so you need to be prepared with rudder) and an increase in power will give you an increase in lift, so you need to push forward on the controls to keep the nose level before trimming the plane a little (as airspeed will be constantly changing during the acceleration, you won’t be able to easily “set” the trim for the new airspeed until you get there).
Rapidly reducing airspeed brings with it a higher work load, as you close the throttle the nose will drop rapidly and the speed will be killed pretty quickly. Now there’s more to do in less time, holding the nose level and starting to trim nose up quickly before bringing the engine power back on to 1900RPM……from a 100knots to 80 knots, there’s about 3.5 seconds to get everything sorted.
Slow Flight with Flaps
As the last part of the lesson, we brought the airspeed down to inside the white arc (Below VFE) – the speed at which the flaps can be operated. And then put the flaps down to 20 degrees.
Looked after the nose of the plane as the flaps moved and then trimmed it up to fly straight and level at 70knots, always looking around for other planes, checking the power and instruments.
We repeated this a couple of times to get a good feel for it.
Bounced Landing
Instructor did the landing, but was to fast and pulled further back into the flare of the landing to kill the speed – but didn’t have the altitude. The result was we hit the main landing gears hard and bounced, he recovered it just fine though.
At some point it will be me making that mistake…..
End of Lesson
All in all the lesson was enjoyable, but the weather was overcast and I didn’t feel I clicked with this instructor the way I have with others. However, flying with lots of different instructors should get me more comfortable jumping in a plane with someone I’ve only just met – when that distant final check flight comes, that’s probably how it will be, so I need to be fine doing it.
I was told I could move on to Climbing & Descending.