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.
