I finally got my first commercial flight lesson out of the way today. Nothing exciting or new, just a review of private maneuvers, mostly so my new instructor can see that I can, indeed, fly. Stalls, steep turns, slow flight, emergency procedures and a few landings.<\/p>\n
Picking a spot to pretend to land in is the only hard part of a simulated engine-out. Once I pick one, it’s all easy. In many places of the world, the best choice is typically fairly obvious. In Oklahoma the problem isn’t finding a field, but deciding on a field. My instructor’s only complaint about my choice of field was that it “was too green” and had some fairly high vegetation. I will admit that the surface of the field didn’t enter into my decision at all.<\/p>\n
(Joanna says that if I don’t put this sentence in herepeople will think that I actually landed in random fields. Now you know that’s not the case.)<\/p>\n
My first landing was a very nice, normal landing. My second landing was supposed to be a soft field, but a gust of wind left me high and slow, and I bounced on the mains a little after dropping out of the sky a good six inches over the runway. Last landing was my first short field in ages, and I nailed it. Cleared my imaginary obstacle and touched down not 10 feet of my assigned touchdown point, and so stopping in the allotted space didn’t even require brakes.<\/p>\n
It was weird looking outside the plane again. I’m so used to staring at the instruments now that I have to try hard not to look at them. Steep turns at 50 degrees of bank were pretty easy, I guess I’ve finally gotten over whatever issue I had with them before. Turn coordination still isn’t wonderfull. I’ll be able to feel it one day.<\/p>\n
I’ve got a 50NM cross country to fly tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I finally got my first commercial flight lesson out of the way today. Nothing exciting or new, just a review of private maneuvers, mostly so my new instructor can see that I can, indeed, fly. Stalls, steep turns, slow flight, emergency procedures and a few landings. Picking a spot to pretend to land in is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flying"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}