A Student Pilot Blog by David Jen
It's been a while since my last cloudscape! Here's N51 after my lesson today, just as an overcast sky was breaking up. Looks like a low layer of cumulus with a broken stratus layer higher up and then some wispy cirrus way higher up. In the foreground is the fuel tank where planes go to drink and be merry.
Labels: Cloudscapes
Calling out the points I needed to work on after lesson № 11 really helped – the act of putting into words what I was missing in my flying made the mistakes easy to fix, basically shaping the obstacles into tangible things. It also made it handy to have a written record I could look back at when I happened to be mentally flying. It took me maybe thirty seconds to reread the list and I was able to reenforce corrections.
With that in mind, I'm going to try it again. Here are the improvement points my instructor pointed out today:
Rudder correction on takeoff. I don't know if it's only the 152 or all single engine tricycle planes, but above maybe 40 kts on takeoff roll, the nose wheel starts to shimmy. It's the plane's not too subtle "I don't like traveling on the ground, damnit." This is easy to correct by taking weight off the nose with a little bit of back elevator. What had previously escaped me was that taking weight off the nose wheel renders it less effective. What used to happen in my takeoffs was roll straight, correct shimmy, swerve to the left, overcorrect to the right, thankfully leave the ground and try to get back on runway heading. But I learned today if I just anticipate the loss of nose wheel authority with extra right rudder, I can keep it straight the whole time and no one panics.
Energy management on final. Landing an airplane is a great time to understand the basics of thermodynamics. You can gain altitude at the cost of losing speed, and you can gain speed at the cost of losing altitude. If you really want to, you can get both by adding energy with the engine, and you can lose both by throttling the engine back or adding drag with flaps. Landing is an exercise in bleeding off energy without going top slow nor too fast and ideally having spent your energy just as you touch the ground. We experimented a bit today with waiting until almost over the runway to put in the last 10° of flaps and it was helpful to really see how that steepened the glide and be mindful of how fast that that drag will eat away energy. Airspeed, glide slope, power, and flaps, all have to do a little dance together to get the plane down correctly.
Flare attitude. Flare is the part in landing where the plane is near the ground and lifts its nose to convert what speed it has left into extra lift to cushion the touchdown. I had been a little too exuberant in my flares, where instead of slowing my descent to zero, I actually started lifting away from the ground, which is not good since I risk finding myself pretty high up at the point the plane runs out of flying energy. My new objective during flare is to not bring the nose above level attitude. "Try to fly level" is what my instructor said. The plane won't actually be able to maintain altitude (again, energy is just about expended), and I have to continually bring the yoke back in my attempt, but the result is a very slow, gentle descent to the ground.
We did five landings today. The first one I was slow on final and didn't have much energy to flare (rough landing). Second one was okay, I did my exuberant flare and so it was a bit of porpoising before actually getting to the ground. Third one a gust hit us during the flare and we lifted away and my instructor had to correct it. Last two I was very happy with; I got us down to where I wanted, controlled my flare, and set down gently.
I've been doing pattern work (no higher than 1000 ft AGL, circling the airport) for the past six flight-hours but am still enjoying it a lot. It's just fun getting to operate planes. I would enjoy sitting in the plane while it's tied to the ground, but I don't want to seem too nuts until I at least get my PPL.
Plane today, N94247
Labels: Flight Lessons