After all the night flying, I know I am very close to check ride preparation time. I’ve got the ASA Private Pilot Oral book and I have started to study it, but I am looking forward to the next bunch of lessons so that I can gather any little tips and tricks for my specific examiner. I’m not looking to cheat, but if he prefers some method over another you better believe I’m going to do the preferred thing. In that vein, today’s lesson started with me looking at my logbook and writing down everything that I had done. I went through line by line cataloging my training so far and had a decent list of everything I’d done. I was short some flying hours, 2 night landings and .7 hours of simulated instrument time. Based on this, the plan was to fly under the hood and do some practical test prep and then finish the lesson with the last two night landings. This is why I like doing night stuff in the winter.
After preflight and taxiing to the runway, Josh told me to get ready to put on the foggles as soon as tenable after takeoff. I took them out of their pouch and set them on my lap. I called that we were ready for takeoff and we were cleared for immediate takeoff. At about 200 feet up, Josh took the controls while I put on the foggles. We tracked a course out to the practice area and then I proceeded to perform several turns, climbs, and descents under the hood. All of this was easy and can get quite boring, so we moved on to slow flight, steep turns, and stalls.
Slow flight under the hood is a completely different beast. For the most part I was doing a decent scan, but at times I found myself locked on the airspeed indicator and everything else was all over the place. Once I determined that it was essential that I focus on my scan, I did much better. Steep turns were a little more difficult under the hood, but not much. I could see what I needed to change pretty quickly by looking at the altimeter or the airspeed indicator. I executed several steep turns that were well with in Practical Test Standards. Stalls, which we only performed power-off, aren’t my favorite maneuvers under the hood. They aren’t really any different from normal, but my focus on the instruments enhanced the other sensations. I took it to the buffet and waited for the stall and as expected it broke; that part is easy. Where I’ve started having more trouble is compensating for the wing drop and the adverse yaw when full power is added. I’ll need more work on stalls.
I finished the rest of my hood time with some vectoring to a good place for ground reference maneuvers. We started with turns around a point. There was a good barn near the interstate in the middle of a field. The first half of the first one was poor, but I recovered. The rest looked pretty good and were well with in standards.
The final maneuver, s-turns, took some work to get set up, but it was pretty easy once I was lined up. The interstate is lined with big electronic billboards that make lots of little points for spacing out the turns. The fact that they light up only helped now that the sun had set and it was getting dark. After a few rounds of s-turns, we called approach and asked for vectors for landing.
We were routed around a bit, which was fortunate considering it allowed the dark to set further. Then once we were switched over to the tower I requested a stop and go. I rode the glide slope in, made a great landing, and rolled out coming to a complete stop. I quickly reconfigured the plane and took off again.
On the trip around the pattern for my last required night landing, I shot myself in the foot. 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. We taxied back to the flight school and secured the plane.
A little practice and a few more hours and I was ready for the practical test. Specifically short field and soft field landings and takeoffs will need some work. I’m most nervous about soft field takeoffs and landings because I haven’t practiced them much.