I got out to the airport this morning for a 0900 start time and it felt good because I feel like it's been a while since I flew in full daylight. The lesson did seem a bit more rushed than usual because both my instructor and the plane were due back for another flight at 1045, but I suppose that's how it works on weekend mornings.
The sky after we landed. Puffy cumulus. A little turbulence, but perfect flying weather.
We did steep turns, ground reference maneuvers, and a simulated engine-out today.
Steep turns are turns with a bank angle of 45° or greater. The thing to keep in mind during turns is that the lifting force of the wings is what's being used to turn the plane. What was used in level flight only to hold the plane up is asked to do two things in a turn: hold the plane up and change its course, so total lift must be increased to keep the vertical component equal to the weight. This is done by bringing the yoke back during the bank, increasing the angle of attack. The increase in lift can be felt by the people inside as well as by the plane's structure. A 45° turn requires a force of 1.4 G to stay level, which is very noticeable and fun if you like Gs.
For ground reference maneuvers, we did a circle around a point and s-turns across a road. There was some light wind, around 5 kts, which was good practice for wind compensation. To keep the circle radius constant, the turn has to be steepened on the downwind leg because the wind causes the plane to cover ground faster, and similarly, the turn is more shallow on the upwind leg as groundspeed is less.
Finally, at around 2500 ft we brought the engine to idle to simulate an engine-out. The emergency procedure is to first set up a glide at the best glide speed, which is a speed specific to the aircraft at which the plane will cover the most ground per altitude loss. In the Cessna 152, this is 60 kts. While slowing to best glide, we scanned the area for possible landing sites, mostly farmland in that area. Once we picked a spot, I headed the plane for it and we talked about whether we would make the field given our glide. We ended up making it easily and were quite high, so we discussed either using full flaps to steepen our descent or spiraling down to lose altitude before overshooting the field.
It's reassuring that the glide attitude is nothing crazy; it's the same as a landing approach, so now I know that yes, the plane can fly and maintain 60 kts without an engine, it just has to give up altitude to do that. I'd like to get in the habit of casing emergency landing spots the whole time I'm flying; another mental load to cycle through as I fly.
Just as with previous lessons, the main thing I'd like to improve on is the mental juggling. It's easy to become fixated on one aspect when I learn it for the first time and consequently, I let other aspects slide out of attention, for example focusing on maintaining a constant radius while circling but losing altitude in the process. Pilots often talk about a scan, a habit of cycling through the flight instruments, other air traffic, the relation of the wingtips to the horizon, front cowling to the horizon, etc, and how this scan is continuous and smooth. It even sounds like it gives people time to think, but I'm still a ways off from there.
These past two lessons, I've caught myself thinking, it would be nice to take a break and just fly straight and level for a couple minutes, or maybe even a couple hours. The nature of flight training is, as soon as I'm comfortable, to add something new so that I'm always slightly to moderately uncomfortable. I understand this is how things are learned and people improve, and I would be wasting my money if I took my CFI up just to fly straight and level to look at the scenery, but it's something I look forward to. When I finally do get my PPL, I will plan a destination that is hours away and I will enjoy the scenery enroute.
Next lesson is Thursday. Also, my instructor pointed me to digiwx.com which provides live weather from the field at N51, so I'll start using that for lesson-time METARs instead of the more public one at KSMQ.
- Flight Hours: 5.5
- METAR N51 091330Z AUTO 35006 10SM CLR 24/16 A3003
The 152 we flew today.
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