Aileron

I had another flight lesson Saturday to work in the pattern practicing landings. I feel like I've plateaued in my training, where my landings and pattern work hasn't improved over the past couple of lessons. I'm getting the plane down sure enough, and almost all the landings are decently gentle, but I don't always feel in complete control and have to be reminded of some things. Pattern work is certainly not boring (as I feared it'd be), and being stuck is not frustrating yet, but I'm not happy with the state of things either.

I can identify a couple reasons for the stagnation, the largest of which are lesson spacing and homework. Because of non-airplane related things going on, the past couple of lessons have been spaced several weeks apart, and I end up using at least one takeoff/landing circuit to reacquaint myself with how to fly the airplane and all the little subpar points in my technique that I forgot about. This uses up time but also puts a dent in my confidence, although I've been pretty good at shrugging that off when the plane lines up on the runway again. It hasn't been the best strategy to space lessons farther apart just as I got into the trickiest part of flight training, but here we are. Anyway: redoubled effort to increase lesson frequency.

Perhaps because the lessons have gotten farther apart, I haven't been doing my homework between lessons. I don't have homework in the traditional sense of assignments that get graded, but I'm always reading through some training material (there's no end yet to stuff to read, thankfully) and I've found that just taking a couple minutes to mentally visualize all the steps to, say, descend and land, helps ingrain things. These activities seem less pressing when lessons are farther apart so they get dropped, which is not good. So back on the homework, kid.

Cessna 152 Instrument Panel; maybe it'll help to stare at this photo more.

Added to that, my instructor helped pinpoint several elements that I should focus on:

Maintain center line on takeoff and landing rolls. This has slowly been improving but I'm far enough in my training that this should really be perfect. The nose wheel should ride the line like a track.

Use trim to help maintain pitch. Pilots can adjust elevator deflection (and therefore pitch attitude) by pushing and pulling the yoke, but they can also recenter the neutral position of the yoke with the trim wheel. This wheel adjusts little trim tabs on the trailing edge of the elevator, kind of like an elevator of the elevator (if you like historical tidbits, search for "buckminster fuller trim tabs"). I've been mostly ignoring the trim wheel and controlling pitch with yoke alone since I thought it'd be easier with one less thing to worry about, but my instructor says it's not. Setting pitch with the yoke and then holding it there using trim leads to steadier flying and less workload on the pilot since he doesn't have to constantly micro-adjust the yoke.

Knowing when to turn in the pattern, especially base to final, has been tricky. I think I just need to get more experience visualizing things.

Intercepting and maintaining center line on final approach. This is similar to maintaining center line on ground roll. I need to be more aggressive about this.

• Flight Hours: 10.8
• METAR KSMQ 241553Z AUTO 10SM CLR 13/04 A3036 RMK AO2 SLP281 T01280044

North American T6 Texan. There was a flight of three Texans at the field while I was flying, doing formation maneuvers and doing photos on the ground. They are large and loud and very pretty.

Labels: Flight Lessons