Breaking on through

After more than a week off from flying (I was overseas for a work conference), I got back home and caught up on sleep over 48 hours, then headed to the airport for a Monday flight lesson. I showed up early and did a little dry flying in the hangar, just to get my mind back in gear.

Sidebar: While I was out of town, my student pilot and aviation medical certificate arrived in the mail. It was in a review state for a month or so, while the FAA requested medical documentation and it sat on a desk. The people on the phone at the FAA office were very helpful, and I'm relieved it's here since you have to have it in place before you can solo (and obviously before you can be certificated as a pilot).

The airplane I'd scheduled for today turned out to have a flat front gear strut (it happens, maybe a hard landing or it just went low), so we parked it on the ramp and got a different airplane so the crew could do the gear maintenance (and so I could land safely). Once in the new airplane (I've flown all the Cessna 150s at the school, so I am familiar with them all), we got the checklists out of the way and taxied to the active runway, two-zero.

It had been a little while since I'd actually flown, and prior to that I was flying two to four times a week. So after getting off the ground I started to get the feel of the airplane and headed out to the east.

I'd done reference maneuvers before on a couple different flights, but never on a windy day. Reference maneuvers include making turns around a point on the ground (you maintain the same distance all the way around and steer to account for the winds that will blow you away) and S-turns (where you choose a straight line such as a road and make turns to fly half-circles on each side of the road - right turn, left turn, wind ahead, wind at your back, etc). After failing to compensate properly on the turns around a point (and getting too close to the target as a result), I finally figured it out and made a couple decent turns. That made the S-turns a lot easier, and I had a lot of fun making some steeper turns on the downwind side of the turns and did a good job getting straight and wings-level each time I crossed the road I was using as my reference.

Next we crossed to the west and headed to the practice area that's defined over Forest Grove. That area had a nice big hole in the clouds with blue sky overhead, and I started my climb to 3500 feet. About half way there, Kelly pulled the engine to idle and simulated an engine out failure. I got the airplane to proper glide speed and checked the fuel and controls, checked the wind (which was coming from my left - or from the south), and pointed into the wind and said I was going to land in that direction. Kelly said good and we reconfigured the airplane to climb the rest of the way to the west practice area.

Next came some power-off and power-on stalls. A stall is simply when the plane's speed through the air is slow enough that the wings stop generating lift, so they "stall" out and the plane starts to fall out of the air. Of course, when it starts to fall the opportunity is there to sly again (as long as you're not too close to the ground). I found I had a tendency to try to pull back on the yoke a little too hard and to rush the stalls as a result, rather than taking it easier and letting the speed bleed off slowly and evenly. You can stall the airplane quickly and steeply, especially with full power applied, but when you do it that way the tail is pointed toward the ground, so when it starts to fall you don't get any elevator control for a few seconds when you start to recover. Once I started to do a better job of taking my time on the controls, the stalls smoothed out and were noticeably easier to control. I think toward the end of the stalling practice I said I wanted to do one more, then one more, then one more. It was good to fine tune the stalls and get them down.

After stall practice, we headed back toward Twin Oaks to practice some landings on the small runway there. Before my travel break I'd had a good experience at McMinnville airport making a bunch of landings, but that airport is pretty huge compared to Twin Oaks (5420 ft. long and 150 ft. wide), so there's a lot of room to "screw up" in any direction in a small plane and still have usable pavement under you. There's plenty enough pavement at Twin Oaks, but the runway is a much smaller target, at 2465 ft. long and only 48 ft. wide. So, the challenges continue to present new opportunities to improve.

We'd gotten an early start (since I was early arriving and so was Kelly) and had lots of time scheduled, plus I was feeling good still, so we got quite a few landings in. My first one was - predictably - a mess. I was too fast, too high (out of trim) and had to try to slip into a crosswind landing the opposite direction from what I'm used to. But I got it on the runway. Betty, the owner of the air park and the airplanes I fly, told me later she saw that landing. I think she cringed as she watched. Luckily the rest of my landings were much better.

My take-offs are really coming together. I can keep it straight and fly it off the runway without unacceptable drift in the winds, I seem to have a feel for setting a crab angle, and I've found if I speak out loud and talk my way through the steps of departure and landing, I'm focused and tend to be on task. So, that's what I do.

The winds on the ground were not too bad, maybe five knots or so initially and they died off quite a bit later, and also shifted from a crosswind to a headwind. As a result, my first landing was on Runway 2, and the rest were on Runway 20 (the opposite direction) as the winds changed. After that first landing I already described, I started to do quite a bit better and with each one I was able to apply the little things I learned on each landing to the next one. I had a high approach and one low approach but was able to correct for them and get to the runway safely.

At some point during the landings we did, the whole process shifted from stressful to fun for me. I think I even said it out loud: "Wow, this is really fun!" Heh. Kelly laughed and said he was just glad to be back in the air, since the rainy weather was pretty terrible the previous week.

We landed at one point, and were coming close to the end of the already-long session. Kelly asked me how I was doing and if I wanted to do one more pattern circuit, and since I had plenty left in me and was making progress, I decided to do another one.

By the time I completed the landing of the day and almost 1.9 hours of flying, I was feeling pretty good about my progress. Kelly said he really thought I'd had some breakthroughs in this lesson. I have another lesson scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, so we'll have to see if the weather will cooperate again. I'm looking forward to it. Kelly tells me he thinks I'm about ready to do my first solo (which consists of flying a few take-off and landing patterns on your own). I told him that with the past couple lessons I've starting to feel substantially more confident about my still-growing abilities. So, now that I have my medical certificate in hand and pretty much everything else required for the first solo, it sounds like it might be coming up sometime soon. Hard not to be nervous - and a little excited - about that.