I thought that today’s lesson would be the first one canceled for weather. I was wrong, but it was just good enough. The plan for the lesson was to knock out some simulated instrument time and a little more practice on flight maneuvers. We were headed out to the Walland Gap practice area. I found the radios easier to handle this time, but I still have a little mic fright. I got a little tongue tied but I got everything sorted out. It helped that there was a rather amusing request made while we were taxiing.
As I switched over to tower (I’m going to be screwed when they want me to contact ground for taxi) to request permission to taxi, a guy radioed in that they were going to be over Midland shopping center taking photos for a minute or two. That was fairly boring, but I wondered what he could possibly be interested in photographing there. Once we were well established on the taxiway, that same guy came back on and said “Knoxville tower, Cessna 81golf, request permission to buzz the tower.” I’m not kidding. I really wish I had a recording. Unfortunately the controller apparently hadn’t seen Top Gun as much as the pilot otherwise he would have responded “Negative 81golf the pattern is full.” It was still good for a laugh.
We headed out to the practice area and started some maneuvers. We had been out there maybe 5 minutes when ATC called us out and asked how much longer we would be. We let them know that we would be at least 30 minutes. Apparently they didn’t like having to monitor our position. It wasn’t really that busy.
I did pretty well with the maneuvers. I did some power off stalls that were pretty smooth. I don’t think they were check ride quality but they were better than any I’ve done yet. We didn’t do any power on stalls because our altitude was restricted due to weather. I did some really good steep turns. The only problem was when I blew right by the heading on the last one. Then we did quite a bit of slow flight. This time it included climbs, descents, turns, as well as straight and level slow flight. About halfway through the slow flight ATC called again and wondered if we could climb to 3500 or above for traffic. We were kind of in a hole so we climbed up to 3600 and continued slow flight. It was pretty easy to stay in the hole but I wanted to make sure that I maintained my altitude and didn’t violate any FARs with respect to meteorological conditions. Overall I think I did really well. I think it was well with in the requirements for a check ride.
After about 10 minutes of slow flight Josh had me put on the foggles. The plane was to knock out at least a half hour of simulated instrument time. I don’t really mind instrument flying. There isn’t much to see, but I understand the importance. Josh called out headings and we basically just flew around for a while before starting back to the field. I wore the foggles until we were just about to enter on a long final.
I ditched the foggles and reduced the power. At about 100KIAS I dropped in 10 degrees of flaps. Remembering back to the traffic pattern work, reduced to about 1600rpm and when I got to 70KIAS dropped in another notch of flaps. Then at about 60 I put in the last notch. At this point I was set up almost perfectly with the exception of being a little high. I was over the end of the airport property so I just brought the power to idle and dropped the nose a little more. The end result was being right on the glide path. 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. It was essentially a perfect landing. This impressed my flight instructor and me. Today I realized that as long as I stick to the fundamentals and I stay one step ahead I can do really well.
We taxied back and tied down the plane. I’ve also gotten pretty good with turning around in tight places. After, Josh gave me a list of the ground reference maneuvers and their associated procedures and I was on my way to study them for my next lesson. Which might come sooner as Josh told me he has time available Saturday, if I’m interested.