A Student Pilot Blog by David Jen
Forgot to grab the METAR again and this one was a good one. Something like 15 gusting to 23 from 330. Lots of hard landings. Rimas had another student who having trouble with motion sickness so she came along as a passenger for this flight to try and train her body to get used to flying. No vomiting, which is always good. Though I don't think she was impressed with my landings.
We started out with some airwork over the Fremont hills and I'm feeling really solid with that. Have to remember to start the flaps up for recovery from approach stalls. Pitch, power, flaps. Then we did a really prolonged engine out simulation. We started from around 3500 ft, picked a landing site, did a slow, circling descent, and went all the way down to short final before bringing the power back and getting out of there. I feel a lot better afterwards, having experienced how much time the plane can glide for. Getting better at reacting to engine out. Airspeed, best landing, checklist.
Then some landings at KRHV, which still need work.
Rimas's schedule opened up at the last minute so we were able to squeeze in a morning lesson again. I like morning flying because (1) I'm a morning person, (2) I'm not tired from work, (3) the winds are calmer, and (4) traffic both on the roads and in the air is less. The downside is I have to choose between having coffee before the flight and needing to pee or delaying coffee and being stupid. I've been going with the latter. Adrenaline is more than happy to step up in place of caffeine when the situation arises.
We had a short calm flight over to Hayward where we did touch-n-goes. Some inbound traffic, but we were the only aircraft doing pattern work. When air traffic is light like that, I can tell the tower controller is bored because he gives me my landing clearance when I'm exactly midfield on the downwind every time, as if his only task is following my little radar blip on his screen. I feel good about doing pattern work at times like those because if I wasn't there, then he'd be really bored.
I'm feeling better about my centerline control. I still don't have the flare down. I'm either pitching up too fast and ballooning or not fast enough and landing hard with a lot of elevator left. Better than yesterday, but still not awesome.
I finally got some no-flap landings down. The plane is really slippery without flaps and I floated a long way, but the reason we came to Hayward was for the long runway, so I just held it above the runway and tried to be patient. Asymmetrical flap failure scares me.
I was getting cozy with N9968F and wanted to book her until soloing so that I'd be familiar with the aircraft, but I found out at the last minute she just got a new engine and club rules say no students while breaking in a new engine. So we grabbed an older, carburated, Skyhawk. During the first descent, I pulled off one of the display dimmer knobs thinking it was carb heat. Whoops. Never good when the pilot is inspecting a knob that's no longer attached to the control panel.
We stayed in the KPAO pattern and did full-stop landings. I wanted to try lessons before work so this was early, around 0800. Winds were calm. More bird activity in the morning. I still need to (1) make sure I don't look through the nose for directional reference, (2) hold back elevator during rollout, (3) smooth out my flares. We also tried no-flap landings but those didn't work to the point of being funny because I just came in too fast and high for the short runway at KPAO that I went around both times.
Same route as the previous lesson: we headed west past Stanford and did airwork near the Stanford Dish. Another simulated engine failure, which I felt better about. I picked up the acronym (A)irspeed – pitch/trim for best glide, (B)est landing spot – find one, go there, (C)hecklist – read it. Somewhere after (B), I run through my mental checklist of fuel, mixture, mags. A mayday call should be in there somewhere too, but the ABC acronym is handy if that's all I have mental bandwidth for.
Another handy mnemonic, one for squawk codes: 75 taken alive (hijacking), 76 radio glitch (radio malfunction), 77 going to heaven (emergency). Kind of morbid but it gets the job done. I've also heard that if switching your transponder to 7600 because your radio failed, you should avoid passing through 7500 because that will make your radar return all sorts of interesting colors on everyone's radar screens, but that sounds like something I'd forget and accidentally do.
Stalls and slow flight are feeling really good. Steep turns could use work, but I think I'm within limits right now.
Landings I need work. I need to stop being passive about the approach and commit to fighting the wind all the way to the ground as soon as I start my descent.