Aileron

Today I had a lesson at the third and final airport near my house, Central Jersey Regional (47N). I met my instructor, we had a brief chat about my previous lessons, and then got into our trainer plane, another Cessna 152.

He had me try the takeoff, my first ever, which was a lot of fun. There are a couple things to keep in mind during the takeoff ground roll that are easy to list now, but were difficult to mentally juggle when I actually tried it: (1) The prop wash (slipstream) of air spiraling backwards from the propellor spirals clockwise if you're looking from the back of the plane. This means that the prop wash hits the tail from the left, making it want to go to the right and therefore push the nose to the left. (2) The clockwise rotating propellor also exerts a gyroscopic precessional force that turns the nose to the left. (3) As the plane transitions from a ground vehicle to an air vehicle, wheel steering becomes less effective and flight control surfaces become more effective. What all this means in summary is that the plane wants to veer left and so you have to counteract it with control inputs to the right, but you have to vary the input magnitude as speed increases even though all you want to do is go straight.

My first takeoff was not the most graceful ever (veering left, veering right, then thankfully in the air), but I would argue it got the job done and no one was hurt.

We climbed to around 2000 ft. while heading over to the Round Valley Reservoir practice area while trying out some basic turns. Another hot afternoon, there was some turbulence, but not enough to be annoying. It was a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. I really like flying over the reservoir because the land around it is an interesting shape and the water reflects the blue of the sky.

After more basic maneuvers over the reservoir, we went on to do some stalls. An airplane stalls when the angle of attack of the wings is too high. This causes the airflow to detach from the wings, they stop producing lift, and the airplane drops. The dropping part is a little scary because there you are trusting this little airplane and suddenly it falls out from underneath you and the ground comes into view. An airplane recovers from a stall by reducing the angle of attack, usually by pointing the nose down for a moment, which causes lift to be restored, and then things are flying normally again.

My CFI initially had the idea of him bringing about and recovering from a couple stalls just to get me used to the sensation, but after a few he suggested I try one myself. We climbed an additional several hundred feet (more space between me and the ground I approve of whole-heartedly), I brought the power to idle, and then raised the nose until the wings gave up and we started to plummet. Easy enough. Recovery was not so easy. I think what happened was I didn't have the wings quite level which caused one wing to drop before the other, sending us into a kind of spiral dive. The thing to do in that situation is rudder towards the high wing to get the wings level as angle of attack is also decreased, but I didn't know this at the time, and my feet certainly didn't know this, and so thankfully my CFI took over. My instinct was opposite aileron to roll us back to level, but the ailerons were ineffective at such low speeds.

I started today to understand a few things which had escaped me earlier: (1) I have more trouble visualizing what the rudder is doing versus the elevator or ailerons, I think because the rudder pedal movements are not as pronounced or maybe because my feet are not as sensitive as my hands (?). I realized today that both rudder pedals need constant pressure, even when flying straight and level. Otherwise the plane will be much more susceptible to a wandering nose as it encounters variations in the wind. Holding the rudder in place with both feet keeps the course more steady. (2) The yoke does not need much input at all. Previously I had gripped the yoke with my fist, but today my CFI made a dedicated effort to cure me of this and had me completely let go of the yoke at times. It was surprising that while I thought the plane was reliant on my strength to hold the yoke in place (I certainly was expending energy with my hand), I wasn't doing anything at all. The yoke stayed in place and the plane held its previous attitude after I let go. Sometimes, the pitch changed slightly, but that was easily corrected with the trim wheel. Little fingertip inputs to compensate for the little air bumps were all that was needed.

Whereas my discovery flight last week was less hands-on and leaned towards simply seeing what it's like to be in a small plane, today's lesson was very much about finding out where my abilities are and pushing them. As soon as my CFI saw that I was comfortable with one aspect, he would add an additional parameter to my mental processing. Constantly being on the cusp of information overload is tiring, but of course this is great in the name of expanding abilities. Pushing limits is never a comfortable thing. My only hope is that my CFI will run out of additional parameters to throw at me before I run out of processing power.

I'm now at the point where I've had three lessons at three different airports with three different instructors in two aircraft models. I'm going to sleep a bit on the pros and cons of each, pick an instructor, and then get some serious lesson time scheduled.

• Flight Hours: 2.5
• METAR KSMQ 251953Z AUTO VRB04KT 10SM SCT080 31/12 A2995 RMK AO2 SLP143 T03110122

The tarmac at 47N. Puffy white clouds.

Labels: Flight Lessons