Lesson 41 - Highway from the Comfort Zone

 I'm writing this a few days after my last lesson, because quite frankly had I posted my thoughts immediately following, it would not be exactly "family-friendly" reading. It was not a good lesson. Not my worst, but certainly far from my best. I'm so close to my pre-solo stage check I can taste it, and this lesson was Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. I was frustrated, even a bit disheartened. Mad at myself, mad at my instructor, just generally not in a good place. As we've all learned one way or another to never hit "send" on an e-mail written in anger, I decided not to publish my original thoughts and reflect on the lesson in order to cast it in a much more objective light.  

First off, I wasn't expecting to fly, having been bumped to the simulator due to my reserved plane (a Grumman) being down for maintenance. A last-minute cancelation freed up a Cessna in my time slot, so my instructor snagged it. Cool! It'd had been over two weeks since my last flight and more maintenance and scheduling cancellations have pushed my next flight to two weeks from now. I was happy not to have a 5-week gap (again!) in my training. Still, my mental prep was for doing VOR navigation and simulated IMC, not take-offs and landings. I've also been flying Grummans recently as I find them a bit more responsive than the Cessnas, in which I have to wait just a second or two to get a feel for whether the control input I just put in is having any effect on the plane. Third, I was flying with my secondary instructor, whose teaching style I'm still getting used to. This is not a criticism, mind you, just a difference and it led to some muttering and tongue-biting on my part during the lesson as I was working through my frustrations. 

We decided to fly out to Spaceport to do touch-and-goes since it looked like things were going to be pretty busy at Centennial. I don't mind the flight to Spaceport because it gives me 10 minutes to gather my thoughts on the way out and just mentally prepare myself. But right from the take-off, I was already a bit on the defensive. When taking off, you want to rotate off the ground at around 55 knots in the Cessnas, but you don't want to continue to climb just yet. You want to get off the ground, then lower the nose to build airspeed. This avoids a "power-on stall" where you try to climb with too little airspeed, stall, then unceremoniously fall back to the ground with (at that low altitude) rather disastrous results. I rotated, then lowered the nose just a bit, but my instructor apparently was looking for more of a nose-lowering than I gave him, so he chided me to lower the nose and proceeded to explain why it was important. "Yeah, I know," I muttered under my breath. I was doing that, just not as fast or pronounced as he was expecting. And that pretty much set the tone for the entire lesson.

We flew out to Spaceport, asked them for touch-and-goes, but they told us the pattern was full. Bummer, but we decided to fly east and kill 10 minutes doing ground-reference maneuvers, and then ask them again if they had room in the pattern for us. My ground reference maneuvers in this case were S turns around a road. It had been a while since I had done ground reference maneuvers, so it felt good to do them. My first attempt turned too soon, but the rest were pretty smooth and even. After a few minutes, we called Spaceport again, and this time they let us in. 

I've got over 100 landings under my belt at this point in my training. Procedurally, I know what to do. What I ran into today wasn't so much a matter of not knowing what to do, but not doing it soon enough or fast enough, and exposing lapses and things I need to not forget to pay attention to. When landing, I try to make small control inputs so not to over control the plane. That's especially problematic on landing, and it's been something I've really been consciously working on, as over controlling in the past had messed up my approaches. Because the Cessna isn't quite as responsive as the Grumman, and because of my known tendency to over control, I was being conservative on the control inputs. More than once I muttered under my breath "I'm $%&! working on it!!!" (and I know once or twice verbally) as my instructor told me to add this or that. I felt most of the time I was doing things right, just not fast enough, thus my instructor was on to the next thing while I was still finishing up the last. This led to a sense of fighting the controls as he's for instance telling me to get the nose down to increase airspeed, while pulling back on the controls because we were getting close to the runway and it was time to round out. Just enough lag to where he's saying one thing and doing something else, which then confused me and led to not-so-great landings. (Cessnas friggin' float down the runway.) Our last outing was much more relaxed and both my instructor and I felt good about my landings, so this felt like a bit of a setback. 

One thing that I did not do well today was my climb-out and turn from upwind to crosswind. I had my controls crossed, meaning I had right rudder and left aileron trying to make a right turn. This is not how you do that, as at low enough speeds, it leads to a stall, spin, and sudden impact with the ground. I think I've been pretty good in the past about adding sufficient right rudder, and my instructors have not mentioned this prior to today, so maybe it was a "just today" thing. Regardless, it really dug into my psyche today. Maybe it was because of the "I know this, how am I not doing this today?" aspect, and maybe that contributed to my interpreting my instructor's tone as wondering how I've gotten this far without knowing this. I kept wanting to say "yeah, I know, I get it," but then each time I took off again, I had to work to get in enough right rudder to stay coordinated through the turns. Hopefully that was just a "today" thing. I went home and hit the simulator pretty hard to work through that. Though completely different in feeling, it was more the mental procedural notes to "keep an eye on the ball" through the process. Correcting it is easy. Knowing to look to stay on top of it so you don't have to correct it in the first place is just another thing to add to the mental checklist. 

As frustrating as things were, let me cast things in a slightly different light a few days after the fact. First, I've noted that my primary instructor tends not to like to see me be too comfortable in the plane. He'll pile on another task for me to do if he sees me getting complacent. I've come to appreciate this, though I usually curse him at the time because it pushes me outside of my comfort zone. I think that's kind of where I'm at with my secondary instructor as well. He's flown with me enough to know I can land a plane. He wants me to get better and more consistent, so he's pushing me to think faster and react quicker. He's picking up on weaknesses in my thought processes and forcing me to fill in those mental gaps. Having to think about my weaknesses while keeping my strengths strong has similarly pushed me outside my comfort zone. In the end, I know I'll be a smarter, better pilot as a result. It's a teaching style that I think will take a bit more time to get used to, but it's already paid dividends. When I think back on the lessons which have left me leaving the field feeling the most frustrated, they're also the ones which pushed me the furthest outside my comfort zone and the ones which taught me the most. 

As they say in skiing, "if you ain't falling, you ain't learning." Every now and then you gotta get knocked back on your heels to push yourself to do better the next time. Yes there were times I wanted to holler "shut up and let me fly the plane!" Yes, I walked out feeling more frustrated than I had in a long time. Then I realize that a lot of that was me; things I wasn't doing well, things I had overlooked. I could fly the plane, but I can fly it much better. I know about being coordinated in turns, but as I tell my kids whenever they begrudgingly say "I know, dad," having knowledge and acting upon that knowledge are two different things. That's where this lesson came from. So, yeah. I left the field feeling frustrated and a bit mad. Now, I get to climb back into the plane, turn that frustration into action, and become a better pilot because of it.