Lesson 18 - Turn on the Hose!

 If you're trying to drink from a fire hose, does the size of the hose really matter?

Today's lesson was simple in scope. Get me in the pattern and teach me to land an airplane. Landing, it seems, is something that different instructors do differently. For instance, some folks write of landing the plane on their introductory flight. Now, I don't know how much of that is actually understanding what's going on with the plane or just pulling on this or pushing on that per your instructor tells you to do to achieve the desired goal of setting the plane back on the ground. I'm inclined to believe in that case it's the "what to do" followed by the "why you do it" later on in the process. Suffice to say that if I'm just learning to land on my 18th lesson, that this is clearly not the approach my instructor is taking with things.

Instead, my instructor's philosophy is to make sure the student understands exactly how the various controls make the plane behave in the various aspects of flight, then ultimately tie them all together because when you land a plane, you're using all your tricks. Turns, slow flight, stall avoidance, altitude control, airspeed, wind correction... there's a lot going on in landing a plane. That's why it's taken me this long to finally get to landing the plane. We wanted to make sure I knew what the heck I was doing so when I got in trouble on a landing, I'd have the skills to get myself out of it. I'm not here to debate one method versus another. This is how I'm learning, and I'm quite happy with the results. That having been said, it doesn't make the process of landing the plane any less mentally taxing. All that stuff coming together to get the plane on the ground means you're thinking through all that stuff while landing the plane. And my brain was pooped at the end of today's lesson. 

We flew out to Colorado Spaceport for today's lesson. My last time out here (which was my first time out here) we did "near" touch-and-goes where I would fly within 50' of the runway then go around. It wasn't my best performance, as my slow-flight recovery that day stank like three day old sushi. This prompted a return to the practice areas and more slow flight and stall work to better hone those skills for a few lessons. But that was behind me. I've become more comfortable with slow flight recovery, so I felt good heading back out here. I at least had the advantage of having flown out here already so I knew the lay of the land. 

The flight out to the airport was uneventful. East from Centennial for a while, then turn north. We can't fly directly northeast because of Denver International's airspace. Winds were a little bumpy, but common for a hot day in Colorado. If you're going to fly in the Summer in Colorado, you deal with bumpy air. The downside to that is that this being my first time setting the plane on the ground, I was going to try to figure out in the process which movements of the plane were caused by my control inputs versus the wind. An extra layer of complexity, but if I waited for perfect conditions, I'd be on the ground a long time. You play the hand you're dealt. 

Landing an airplane is a matter of controlling airspeed and altitude as you approach the runway. "The pattern" is essentially a rectangular flight path that you and other aircraft generally follow so to not hit each other (very bad) and give you benchmarks along the way against which to check your airspeed and altitude. If you think of the runway as the long side of a rectangle, then the "downwind leg" of the pattern is the opposite side. This is where you will typically begin preparing for a landing. You then turn to the base leg, which would be the short end of the rectangle, then "final" is when you're lined up with the runway to set the plane on the ground. The opposite end on departure in the pattern is called the "crosswind" leg. "Pattern altitude" refers to the elevation above the runway. For general aviation (small planes), that's usually 1,000' above the ground. The field elevation at Colorado Spaceport is 5,515', making the pattern altitude 6,500'. There are altitude and airspeed steps for each of the legs of the pattern. The downwind leg in the Cessna, the downwind leg is flown at 1,000' above the ground (AGL) at around 90 knots. When you get to the end of the runway you'll be landing on, you decrease power to begin descending. Halfway through your base leg, you want to be 500' AGL, and at around 75 knots. You continue descending, turn to the final leg, and fly such that your airspeed is around 65 knots when you cross the threshold of the runway, At that point, you decrease your power to idle, let the plane glide, and start your "flare" to land on the runway as the airspeed and altitude decreases. If the stars are smiling, you set down nice and easy. Child's play. And if you believe that, let me talk to you about your car's extended warranty.

"Pitch for airspeed, power for altitude." That's the rule. (I remember it by the fact that "i" is the second letter in both "pitch" and "airspeed.") If you're flying too high, decrease your power and let the plane sink for a bit. If you're flying too fast, raise the nose of the plane to bleed off the airspeed. You can add flaps at various stages to increase drag and slow down as well but pitch and power are the key players. It's really a dance between the two. You will set your pitch for a given airspeed, but you won't be sinking, so you reduce power, which lowers the nose, which may increase your airspeed, so you have to raise the nose to lower the airspeed, which means you're not sinking as much, so you have to lower again, but you can't pitch up too much or you'll stall... Oh, and you're dealing with wind bouncing you around, too, and trying to stay lined up with the centerline of the runway... did I mention the firehose? The reality is that there's no way to introduce this concept gently. This is being thrown to the wolves, grasping everything you've learned and applying it. 

As I approached the airport on an extended final (about 5 miles from the east), I got us lined up, but then my instructor flew the landing to demonstrate how the landing itself was done. He described what he was doing (as he's done on our landings of late) so that I could get a feel for the control movements and their effects on the plane. After he flew this one, I did 4 subsequent landings. They were about as good as you might expect from a student pilot landing for his first time. Which is to say they were rough. But truthfully not as bad as I had anticipated. And I was very happy with my transition from landing to take-off. Flaps up, throttle full, keep us on centerline. pull back on yoke, rotate, go again. 

I think my approaches were rougher than actually setting the plane down on the ground over the runway. The biggest challenge to me was setting that mental sight picture of the glide slope, and reacting to how it changed when I was too high versus too low. I need to be faster to react, especially to "too low." That's an experience thing. The other thing that caught me was trying to gauge how quickly my control inputs would affect the plane. If I drop the motor to idle, how long would it take for my altitude to drop back on glide slope, and how much would it take increase the throttle to re-establish that proper slope once I was back on track. I don't think I let my airspeed get too slow through any of this, but my instructor was probably keeping a closer eye on that and reminding me in the process if it started getting too slow. Overall, I think I tended to be too fast, which prompted a go-around on one of the attempts. (Which was probably one of my smoother recoveries except for not pitching up more when I retracted the flaps, causing me to lose a bit of altitude.) I can't say there was any improvement across the board from my 4 attempts today, but I was able to get a feel for the process. Now that I know what to look and feel for, through, I'll be able to start making better adjustments. Like many things in this process, it's a matter of identifying the key things that are tripping me up and addressing them one at a time as I put this together.

We headed back to Centennial, but don't think it was an easy cruise. The afternoon winds had gotten bumpier, and my instructor has a bit of an evil streak in him to where he doesn't like me to ever be 100% comfortable in the cockpit. As I was flying back, he had me climbing, turning, tuning the radios to Centennial's tower frequency and giving him briefings of what we're going to be doing pretty much at the same time. I have a tendency of focusing on one aspect to the exclusion of another, so I managed to climb 300' while trying to tune in a radio frequency. I'll shift some of the blame for that to the smoky skies and lack of a horizon, so I didn't have as clear of a marker as I might otherwise have, but that's an excuse and I have to do better regardless. 

Things to work on... First off, I need to be better at calling out what I'm doing as I'm getting set up. "Below 110, flaps 10," and other call-outs for flight configurations. I need to call these out not only so my instructor knows what I'm doing, but because it's a good mental exercise to tell myself what I'm doing. I have a habit of talking to myself anyway, so you'd think this would come naturally. I'll chalk that up to landingus overwhelmus today, but if I write it here, I'll hopefully remember to do it next time. Also, on go-arounds, it's critical to call out what you're doing in terms of airspeed, flaps, etc. 

Second, I need to be ready for go-arounds at any given moment. My instructor warned me that I may be flying my best approach ever, and he's going to shout "coyote on the runway, go around!" to keep me on m toes. That's a mental piece of the puzzle that I need to integrate into the process--that at any given time, I may have to 100% shift gears and do something else, and when you're that low to the ground, you have to execute quickly and firmly. 

Overall, I was happy with how I did today. It wasn't pretty by any stretch, but I wasn't expecting it to be. When I look back at my other "first time doings" I've had so far, my demonstrated (lack of) skills is really on par with how poorly I did in those other areas as well, and I've come a long way in those areas. This, too, shall improve. Hopefully cooler weather in the coming weeks will give me calmer skies so I can feel "my" flying versus the wind's flying. 

Oh, and walking out to the plane, I spied this old warbird. Alas, he went the other way instead of taxiing by me, so this is as close a pic as I could get.

Lesson 17 - Short, but Sweet

 

Today was supposed to be a fairly long day. We planned to fly east to Limon to spend some time in the pattern at Limon Municipal Airport. Limon is an airport that does not have a control tower, so that makes it a bit easier to start drilling into how to land the airplane because there's not as much traffic and you may even have the field all to yourself. Limon's about 40 minutes away by air, so we we planned some cross-country skills building and some maneuvering on the way as well. That's what was supposed to happen.

Instead, the front desk changed my plane at the last minute because something went screwy with the plane I was supposed to fly on its first flight of the day. They grounded it and gave me a replacement that had only 1.4 hours until its next mandatory servicing. The flight to Limon and back would have put at least 1.8 on the plane. Even if that had not been the case, we were fighting what looked to be some sketchy weather moving in a bit faster than what was originally forecast. The winds had already increased significantly. When I was planning things at 10AM, the weather at the field had the winds listed as "calm." When I got to the field at 11AM, they had picked up to a steady 11 knots, gusting to 18. Whatever we did today, it would have to be fairly quick because the weather and the required maintenance schedule mandated it.

My instructor and I thought briefly about just scrubbing because the radar already showed big green blobs of precipitation over the southwest practice area. Conditions were still well within our minimums, so flying wouldn't be unsafe. We would just want to be back before things deteriorated. I had a theory that I wanted to test, and even if that was all we had time to do today, it would be worth it. If you remember my last lesson, you'll recall that my stall recoveries were abysmal (to put it mildly). Upon reflection, I figured that the likely cause of my difficulties lay in the fact that I applied power almost instantly when I went to recover from the stall. This would not give me sufficient time to get the necessary control movements in place to counteract the forces created by increasing the throttle. If I were to try to do that just a bit slower, then I would be able to keep ahead of the curve. That was the theory, and I wanted to test it. The winds hadn't gotten any worse and the green blobs were tracking north (away from us) so we decided to go ahead and fly.

Aside from the engine backfiring when I started it scaring the living daylights out of me, the preflight and taxiing was pretty routine. I have to admit there's a level of confidence tied to the notion that these things are beginning to become "routine" to the point where I'm mostly skipping over them in my posts. My taxiing still isn't 100% centered on the yellow line, and I'm still learning how to deal with crosswinds on the ground, but I'm recognizing it and correcting for it. I'll take that for the win. Take-off went smoothly, though I drifted a bit to the left (towards the parallel runway) once I was off the ground. I swear, planes need rear view mirrors. I thought I was good based off of what I saw out of my side window, but nope. I drifted so I was probably in line with the taxiway between the two runways. Corrected, and continued the climb out and headed towards the southeast practice area. This was one of the first times I really felt like I had the airplane trimmed well for climbing to altitude by skill rather than luck. We continued flying southeast while I climbed to 8,500'. 

Clouds were rolling in around us, and I could feel the air getting a bit bumpy. I was able to keep things mostly consistent in altitude, but the plane I was flying in today had a throttle that wasn't quite as sensitive as the throttles in the others I've flown, so my "small adjustments" to the throttle didn't result in the RPM drops I was accustomed to on the other planes. Lesson learned - adjust RPM by listening to what the engine is doing, not by the feel of the throttle lever. 

Once in the practice area, I got the plane trimmed for straight and level flight, then set up for a power-off stall drill. I got it set up, stalled the plane, and went through the recovery quickly but carefully. And, yes, the key to successful stall recovery is just that--work through the steps with a sense of urgency, but not panic. Give yourself about 2 seconds from idle to full throttle, and you'll have time to adjust the yoke, rudder, and flaps to give yourself a much more controlled recovery. I was happy with that recovery, as was my instructor. Anything was an improvement after my last attempts. In this case, it was a matter of me finding the critical element that was causing the trouble and correcting it for much better results as opposed to just blindly trying stuff and hoping for success. 

Happy with that, my instructor looked at the big green blobs showing precipitation on our weather radar and the visible virga that was now encroaching upon us, and said "take us home." Virga (rain falling from clouds but evaporating before hitting the ground) often comes with downdrafts. Those are dangerous, especially at low altitudes. My instructor took the controls while I dialed in the radios, got the latest weather info, contacted ATC, and ran checklists. On the approach, we talked through the steps we were taking especially with gusty winds adding to the fun, such as little to no flaps and landing at a higher speed than normal. I was just along for the ride on this one given the adverse conditions, but we talked about the what and why of what my instructor was doing in the process. We landed, taxied back to the ramp and tied things down for the day, but not before admiring some Colorado National Guard planes that had stopped for refueling on our way back to the pad. 

Once on the ground, my instructor and I talked about where I am in the process overall. At this point, the big unchecked checkbox is the landings. He told me my take-offs, maneuvers, and pilotage are good. I'm just missing the mandatory part of flying--the landing. The challenge will be finding calm days to do pattern work. My flights in the coming weeks are scheduled for the late morning/early afternoon when weather like what we had today is possible. That makes it difficult to learn the basics because you can't tell whether the plane is reacting to the wind or control movements. On one hand, if you can learn in that environment, you can land in almost anything, but it's gonna take a whole lot longer. We'll see what the next lessons bring. Maybe if we can't do pattern work, we'll do some cross country work or who knows. And practice that other stuff because I need to keep that fresh as well.

Lesson 16 - Stall and Recovery

 

First off, I apologize for no scenery pictures on today's post. My phone mount fell off the windshield, so I just tossed it in the back seat rather than try to reattach it mid-lesson. So this representation of what the nose of the airplane was doing during my stall recovery drills will have to suffice. 

Seriously... Stall recovery is the bane of my existence at the moment. Some days I get it very smoothly. Others it gets me. And today was an "other" day for that. I'm not going to dwell too much on that, but for students who are hitting brick walls or plateaus in their training, this seems to be mine at the moment. There are four components to a proper stall recovery. First, apply full power. Second, keep the nose to the horizon to get air moving over the wing and reestablish lift. Third, right rudder to counter the left-turning tendency of applying full power. Lastly, retract flaps. All four of these things have to happen pretty much simultaneously. Today seemed to be "pick three of the four." I did a half dozen or so drills, and only one was even halfway decent. I'd forget one element, and all hell would break loose. In retrospect, I think my successful stall recoveries in the past have been done with a firm, steady, but not rapid application of power. This allowed me to balance the right rudder and counter the desire for the nose to buck up with a bit more smoothness because the throttle increase was fast enough to get the job done but slow enough to still be able to stay ahead of it. In today's drills, I think perhaps my application of power was far more of an immediate jamming of the throttle into the dashboard. As that happened, I was then playing catch-up with the plane and overcorrecting. Nothing good ever comes of overcorrecting.

Fortunately, my instructor realized that for whatever reason, this wasn't clicking for me today, and decided to move on to other things. Today, he introduced me to steep turns. Did I mention steep turns are friggin' fun??? I hadn't done one yet (at least not on purpose). In steep turns, you bank the plane to around 45 degrees to make the turn. You lose a lot of your vertical lift component when you do this (mathematically, half of your vertical lift component is now horizontal "lift." That component is allowing you to turn, but it's not helping you stay in the air. You have to increase your throttle and add some back pressure on the controls to increase the vertical component of the lift to keep you from losing altitude. You then have to remember to take that back out when you exit the turn. One thing with steep turns, you will also really feel it in your seat. They can also be disorienting, mind you, since you're looking at the world zip by. The key is to keep the horizon at a given point on the glare shield as you're turning. What surprised me, though, was looking at the flight path and seeing how tight those steep turns really are compared to the broader more typical 30-degree bank turns I do when maneuvering in the practice area. They're like less than half if a third of the diameter. These were a pleasant (and successful) diversion from my dismal stall recovery, so that helped get my mind back in the game.

Partway through today's flight, my instructor pulls my throttle to idle and says "you just lost your engine. Now what?" First, let me say that for those new students who are kind of dreading this, I was surprised at how controllable the plane is. You don't just fall out of the sky. First step is to pitch for best glide, then look for a place to land. Check to make sure you have fuel, the key is still on, the choke hasn't been pulled out, and all the "should be obvious" things. If it's one of those, correct it and restart the engine. If it's not, try the fuel pump to get fuel flowing again. If you can do all of that quickly, you will not have lost too much altitude in that time. That way if you can't get the engine to start, you still have plenty of airspeed and altitude to formulate ideas. Because my instructor pulled the throttle to idle for this exercise, I dismissed that as a cause, but it can be something that simple. (And--really--who decided the throttle and choke should be right next to each other? It's a good thing the knob on the choke has a different physical feel to it.) I have to work on verbalizing my checklists a bit more, but overall I felt comfortable in my ability to control the plane and try to troubleshoot. 

We were hoping to get some pattern work in at the airport today, but ATC was having nothing to do with that. So we flew a few more circles, got our weather info, and started heading back to the airport. The past few times, I've flown the approach with my instructor handling the landing. Today the winds were calm so I got to handle the landing as well--my first time with my hand on the yoke and throttle as we landed. Don't misunderstand--my instructor's hand was also on his yoke, and he was dancing the rudder pedals as we came in as well, so to call this landing the product of my efforts would be akin to saying the waterboy won the Super Bowl. However, it was a good introduction to pitch and power management for landing, and likewise a good introduction into really burning into my mind the sight picture of what the runway should look like on approach. Yeah, I paid attention the previous landings, but things get a whole lot clearer when it's your hand advancing the throttle to gain altitude because you've got 4 red lights on the PAPI. I'm looking forward to this next phase of the process.

One quick side comment about communication. Instructors aren't mindreaders, so as a student when you're flying, be very communicative about what you're doing so your instructor knows why the plane is doing what it's doing. For instance, when we were returning to the airport, my instructor pointed out that 2000 RPM wasn't a cruise speed. I knew that, I wasn't cruising. I was doing a slow descent into pattern altitude. I didn't tell him that's what I was doing, so he thought I wasn't paying attention to straight-and-level. Likewise, ATC told us to join midfield right pattern. There's an IKEA store at the midfield point of the pattern. I wasn't flying towards the IKEA, rather I was headed a bit south, towards the south end of the runway. My instructor asked me why I wasn't flying to the midfield point. I wanted to enter the pattern at a 45-degree angle as is common, so I was flying further south before turning northeast so I could join midfield at that 45-degree angle. Had I told my instructor that's what I was doing, it would have cleared up his concerns. Aviate, navigate, communicate. 

Oh, and make sure not to leave your headset in the plane. Thankfully they'll be waiting for me at the front desk next time. That could be part of the reason I didn't spring for the $1,200 Bose headsets. I lose stuff. I just ordered prescription sunglasses for flying. I'm gonna have to put a GPS tag on those.

Lesson 15 - Just Fly the Plane

 

Due to continued smoke and wind making conditions unpalatable, it had again been more than a week since my previous lesson. Since that lesson was hamstrung by wind and weather, it had been more than a month since my last decent lesson. I was looking forward to getting up and in the air again. Today we had fairly steady, but light winds, and the threat of early afternoon storms boiling up over the mountains. My instructor texted me prior to me leaving for the airport to see if I had checked the forecast. I told him I noticed the chances for afternoon storms, but at that point they were not going to hit until we would have landed. The forecast kept changing every time I looked at it, so "fickle as the wind" seemed to be a fitting metaphor. We agreed to head to the field and play it by ear. I went out, pre-flighted the plane, had the tanks topped off, all the while watching the clouds build over the mountains. My instructor joined me, and the storm cell that was initially tracking to the north had changed direction, headed pretty much straight for us. Ugh. We decided to keep going with the pre-flight, pulled the plane out to the line, did our safety briefing, and checked the weather one last time before finally deciding whether to turn the key (thus the meter). The storm had resumed its original northward track, so I decided to go for it. It was bouncy last lesson, so we figured if it were as bad today we could always return home. I felt the need to get into the air, though, because I was worried about my skills really regressing with only one decent flight in a month's time. The winds weren't too bad, out of the north at 8 knots. The skies were scattered with clouds, but the lowest at 3500', which was still above where I would be flying. The storm was still a threat, but not heading our way. Clear prop, turn the key, and let's go fly. 

The first thing I noticed when taxiing (headed west) was that the plane was not responding to my left rudder pedal. I had it to the floor, but the plane would only continue straight at best. I had my instructor take the controls to see if it felt odd to him. Of course it didn't. He knew exactly what was going on. 

"Where are your hands?" 

Right hand on the throttle, left hand, um, on my knee, not on the yoke. (I think I do this subconsciously so I don't try to steer with my hands. Bad habit. Well, both are bad habits. One bad habit to break another? Probably not the best plan. But I digress.) Did I mention the winds are from the north? Did I mention we were taxiing west? I've run into this before, I just didn't make the connection. Word problem - North wind hits tail of plane heading west. Which way does the nose want to turn? Hint - it ain't to the left. Step 1 - put hand on yoke where it belongs. Step 2 - turn ailerons into the wind with hand that is now on the yoke. Step 3 - apply more left brake to help plane turn left when needed because that north wind is going to keep hitting the tail. Ahh, much better.

I chose to learn on the Cessna 172S because my school has about a dozen of them. That means if one goes down for maintenance, there's a good chance I can book another in its place. While I have one that I seem to gravitate towards, I rotate through three or four of them for my lessons. They all fly more or less the same, but none of them have the same radio and navigation set-up. This means if there's one thing I kinda have to feel my way through each time, it's setting the radios up. All I'm going to say is that it's a good thing ATC is trained not to respond to idiot pilots who are talking on the wrong frequency. Having said that, once I was actually on the correct frequency, I did probably my best job of talking to ATC today, and handled the majority of the calls myself. 

I heard ground control clear a business jet to taxi, then cleared me to taxi on the same taxiway. He was about 2000' up from me on the taxiway, so if I were to pull in front, I would have had plenty of separation. I was a bit unsure as to whether I should wait for him to pass since he was cleared first, but my instructor said "move" with the same intonation as we give someone in front of us at a green light after about half a second. He then explained that while the business jet was cleared before me, a) I was closer to the end of the runway, and b) the controller knew where I was and wanted me in front of him despite him clearing me second. His wake turbulence would be greater, so better to have the smaller plane go first. Sometimes the lessons you learn aren't found in textbooks.

Lined up on the numbers, applied power, and we were off and flying. Once we were 500' above the ground, we turned to the southeast towards the practice area. On the agenda for the day, pilotage (aka, getting where you're going based on landmarks) slow speed and stalls, and after our last flight, altitude and speed control in general. 

I can't explain the difference between this flight and the last. The winds weren't as bumpy and the skies were just a bit clearer, but they were still factors to be dealt with. I just felt so much more on top of my game today than perhaps I have thus far in this entire process. Maybe it was the confidence of handling the radio communication. Maybe it was because it was my call on the weather to go flying in the first place. Whatever it was, there was a sense of ownership of the process. I definitely hope I can tap into that going forward. It will make my life (and my instructor's nerves) much easier. Our slow flight and stall training went very smoothly. The first one was a bit rough because I forgot how quickly the plane slows down when you reduce power and introduce flaps. I was taking too long to talk through the steps as opposed to just doing what needed to be done. Once that rust was quickly removed, things went cleanly. 

After a few bouts with that, my instructor turned and said "just fly the plane. Go wherever you want." I thought briefly about doing ground reference maneuvers or things like that, but that wasn't the mood. I wasn't frazzled by anything we had been doing. There wasn't the (figurative) cloud hanging overhead saying "you could have done that better, try again." I was just up there having fun and feeling good about how I was flying. I pointed the nose to the east and just enjoyed being in the air. After all, that's why I'm doing this--to be able to just fly where I want to and have fun doing it. I turned south, then when I came to highway 86 below us, I turned west to follow that back towards Franktown before heading back to the airport. Once I figured out that ATC wasn't responding to me because once again I didn't have the right radio punched up, I fixed that, told them where we were, and they gave me my routing back to the airport. 

I flew the plane until we were on the last part of the final approach because we had a bit of a gusty crosswind (the storms were beginning to roll in with their impact), and my instructor figured that was probably going to be a bit problematic if this were to be my first go at setting us on the ground. (I wasn't going to argue with him. My last time "in the pattern" lining things up wasn't the smoothest.) 

We parked the plane and walked back to the terminal both feeing very positive about things. I'm not going to say "it clicked." It wasn't that kind of a moment. If there's anything that can be said about my lessons, there are good days and there are bad days. Consistency, while being key, is still proving somewhat elusive. Hopefully today's experience will change that, and hopefully my planned schedule of flying twice a week will greatly reinforce the good while eliminating the bad. We talked about stage checks and figuring out which boxes still yet need to be checked to get me ready to solo. We hadn't had that conversation yet, so whether it was pure coincidence that we were having that today or not, it felt good to see a tangible sign of progress towards my goal. 

P.S. I left the field at 1:30pm. By 3pm, we had reports of funnel clouds and 1" hail in the area. Yeah, I think we got the last decent air of the day. Glad we decided to go up. 

Lesson 14 - Cobwebs and Wind Gusts and Smoke, Oh My!

 

Due to vacations and airplane maintenance issues, it had been over three weeks since my last time in the air. I fully expected a few cobwebs, so I wasn't necessarily surprised by the roughness of today's flight. That was only one of the issues I dealt with today. "Ideal conditions" were not the order of the day. Still, I spent as much time fighting myself as I did the elements, and that has to improve.

Preflight inspection, run-up, and taxi to the runway went well. I'm getting much more confident on my radio calls, and handled a good load of the communication today. Take-off went okay until I just started to rotate, at which point the plane veered to the right. I may have over-corrected with too much right rudder, or didn't have the yoke as firmly gripped as I thought I did, but I certainly didn't have an answer for what happened at that moment. I quickly had my instructor take things to get us off the ground and then took over once we were clear of the runway. 

Climb-out went well, though right out of the gate, we hit some wind gusts which bounced us around a bit. Welcome back to the sky. But wind is part of flying, so I took this as a lesson in making adjustments and working through it. The bigger issue for me today was the lack of a clearly-defined horizon. If you look at the photo at the top of the article, that's what the skies looked like today. Smoke from the California wildfires has been drifting into Colorado for the past week, and our skies are dismal as a result. A few days ago, it was so bad that many airports went IFR. Today was clearer than that, but visibility was not much more than VFR minimums.

Today's lesson was altitude control and trim exercises, since last time I was having trouble getting a true feel for how to properly trim the plane. I'm not going to pawn my poor performance today off on the wind and smoke--a lot of it was me--but the two certainly combined to keep me a little off balance. My altitude control s-t-a-n-k today. There's no other word for it. (Well, there is, but I'm keeping this blog polite.) Yes, part of that had to do with gusts pushing me up and down. And not having a distinct horizon to gauge my pitch played a role as well. It's hard to gauge where your nose is pointing when it's all a mostly grey blob. So I relied a bit more on my instruments today, which if you've read my earlier blog entries can guess how well that went.

Before I beat myself up too much, I will say that today's trim lesson went well. We did some exercises where my instructor put the plane in a random pitch attitude and had me recover. This let me get a sense for how to gauge what the plane wants to do in terms of nose up or down without the plane going full nose up or down. I got to where I could sense the trend by just a little movement (at least when we weren't being bounced a bit), and during a reciprocal exercise where I put the plane in a trim pitch to have my instructor recover, I really felt the pressure change on the yoke as I randomly spun the trim wheel up and down while holding the pitch with the yoke. I'll chalk that up to be a success, perhaps not as stellar as I would hope, but a success nonetheless.

No, what hung me up today more than anything else wasn't trim or wind or smoke, it was airspeed, as in not enough of it. I wonder if I am just so used to slow flight exercises that I'm just used to holding altitude with pitch that I don't pay as much attention to airspeed as I should, I don't know. Whatever the cause, the result is a tendency to not be flying near as fast as I should be. Cruise speed should be around 90 kts. As you can see from the graph, I was all over the place on airspeed, and altitude bounced around as a result. I wasn't clean in keeping altitude, I wasn't clean in correcting for it, and I think it came down to not using power properly. I'd pull back power to descend, then forget to add it back in once I got to the desired elevation. I don't think I did a single turn today without gaining or losing 100'.

On top of these challenges, my instructor--ever wanting to keep me on the outside edge of my comfort level--had me tuning radios, getting ATIS information, and contacting ATC while going through these maneuvers. There's part of me that was cursing him for this, but multitasking is part of flying, and I need as much practice with that as I do every other aspect. And let's be realistic; if we can't handle adversity in the air, we have no business flying airplanes. 

Overall, not my best outing, but a challenging one. Nothing I did poorly today was because I wasn't able to do it, it was because I was fighting myself as much as the environment in which I was flying. Thursday's another day, and we'll be doing more pattern work similar to my previous lesson. Now that I have a better feel for trim, and I know the bumps I hit today and how to avoid them, I think I'll do a lot better.

Lesson 13 - More Days Like This

 

 

I need more days like this. Not just because things went well (which for the most part they did), but because there were also enough stupid little errors made to remind me that I need to be on my game in every aspect of this process and really prompt me to do better next time. 

 

After my previous lesson doing almost touch-and-goes at a smaller airport, we decided that working approaches and recoveries at a higher altitude over landmarks designed to simulate an airport was probably a wise idea. My dirty slow flight recoveries last time were not what you want 50' off the ground, so I wanted to get better at that. I've done it, I can do it, I just need to get much more consistent at doing it. So we took things up a bit higher and just worked drills on plane control in the various phases of landing, with an extra 500' between us and the ground below. 

 

ATC cleared us to take off on 35 Left. I read it back, wrote it down, and we started taxiing to the taxiway. After momentarily forgetting that 35L was to my left with a quiet "which way you going?" from my instructor, I proceeded down the taxiway (the correct way) with a long line of planes in front of me. ATC told me to take take A16 and hold short, which momentarily threw me for a loop. Oh yeah... 35L. That long line of business jets was lining up for 35R. I had to cross to get to the parallel runway. I remembered that once I got ATC's instructions, but I had I double checked the airport diagram when getting the instructions, I would have anticipated those instructions, not been smacked back into reality by them. Dumb. That's why we have airport diagrams on our kneeboards, so we can trace where we're going.

Dumb moment #1 put aside, we left and headed to the practice area. My radio calls are getting better, more natural. Once in the practice area, we started with slow flight and recovery drills so I could get my feet under me on those. That went well. We then started on simulated patterns, using a roadway as a reference runway. This went okay, though I seemed to alternate between two different roads. Not ideal, but I got to feeling pretty good about being more on top of my airspeed and altitude than I have been in the past. How I was doing on a glide slope with an extra 500' between me and my ground reference was a bit iffy, but I got a good handle on that whole "pitch for airspeed, power for altitude" thing. But there's one other part of that equation, and it's a four-letter word. T-R-I-M. Once you establish your glideslope, you trim the airplane to relieve pressure on the yoke so you can make a smoother decent, allowing you to concentrate more on crosswinds, etc. Well, I'm having a devil of a time setting trim properly in this environment, possibly because I'm focusing on pitch to control my airspeed, and those adjustments themselves aren't fluid yet. But whatever the reason, I'm working too hard and my recoveries are, well, rough.

So next on the agenda was an exercise where my instructor put the plane in a random pitch/trim attitude, handed me the controls, and said "fix it." Well, first off, when your instructor's aim is to teach you to trust the airplane to fly so you can feel the controls then adjust with your primary flight surfaces (rudder, aileron, elevator), DO NOT reach for the trim wheel to correct things. My instructor seldom (if ever) yells at me, but I deserved it this time. My first instinct was to do precisely what he is teaching me not to do. I'm pretty sure whatever he said verbally was a diplomatic version of "did you not listen to a bloody word I just said, you blithering idiot??" After being justifiably scolded with an impromptu lesson the difference between primary flight control surfaces (Ailerons, elevator, rudder) versus secondary (flaps and trim) we set off on a few more of similar fixes, where I did a bit better. Not great, but better. I'll get it. It's a "feel" thing, and you have to feel it often enough to know what it's supposed to be.

We headed back to the airport. I called into the tower and we got our landing instructions. I watched our airspeed and altitude at various landmarks to make mental notes of where I need to be at which stage on landing. 

Got on the ground and began taxiing back to the pad. The plane I was flying today did not have a GPS screen which displayed my ground speed, which I usually try to keep around 10 - 12 kts on the ground. It's okay. My ForeFlight app displays that, and I've got that pulled up on my phone which is on my window. Except the screen was not the right screen. I instinctively reached to tap the screen to bring up the map page, but in looking at that, I had veered off the yellow line far enough for my instructor to ask (again) where I was going. Don't text and drive, dummy.

So, all in all a good day. Lots went well, lots to work on, and a smattering of really dumb moments which will (hopefully) never be repeated.