I am mostly ready for my check-ride. I was 1 hour short or 40 and I need some work on controlling my stall recovery. That was the plan for this lesson. In the last lesson we had done a lot of work on the maneuvers and revisited stalls. This idea behind this flight was to get some more practice with stalls to make sure that the procedure sticks. The last thing I want is to get out and spin it on the check-ride.... Read more »

Josh let me know on the very end of the downwind, that my electrical system had just failed. He turned down all the lights, and we were in the dark. All I had was runway lights, engine sounds and a stall horn to guide me. My response to this was, "Oh...does that mean I have no flaps either?" (The Skyhawk has electric flaps.) So now it was a no flap landing too. Nevertheless, I made a really good, short landing.... Read more »

In an effort to be smooth I was trying to maintain glide as best as possible and I was doing perfectly. As we got near the runway I slowed the descent as smoothly as I could and let the speed bleed off. I new we were in ground effect so I just let it float a little bit as we slowed down maintaining pitch so that we didn't slam down on the runway. By the end of the relatively short float the stall horn went off and the airplane settled silently onto the runway. There were no bumps or anything.... Read more »

Our final task was steep turns. I had but one question, what is the steepest one should go? This was answered with Josh performing a 60 degree steep turn. I felt like I was looking almost straight down at the ground. Then it was my turn I stayed closer to 45, which is nothing to shake a stick at. I lost some altitude but not bad for a first try. Josh had me do a steep turn to the right and we headed back to the airport straight away.... Read more »