It’s ridiculous. All I need to solo is a 3,000 foot ceiling, 5 miles visibility, and less than 18 knots of wind including gust factor. And it seems like it’s never going to happen. It’s either cloudy or windy. This morning it was cloudy AND windy for a change. The winds aren’t supposed to get below 20 knots until tomorrow NIGHT. They’re howling right now, and it’s after midnight.<\/p>\n
I went up and did some maneuvers today, since I hadn’t flown in 5 days. I’m quite comfortable in the airplane, even while getting rocked around a good bit today. We probably should have worked on landings, since my stalls, steep turns and slow flight is all doing quite well. I’ve gotten to where I can fly at 40 knots in gusty conditions just fine. Not perfect, I waiver between 40-50 knots instead of holding it right at 40. Today D. kept saying, “Man, you’re awfully close to a stall.” “Well, that’s the definition of minimum controllable airspeed– the speed at which any increase in angle of attack or decrease in airspeed results in a stall…” “And yes, you’re there.” Course, he has me fly at MCA and track a river, which is bloody well impossible, because I can’t SEE the river when I’m up at 30 degrees, and can’t think straight with the stall horn going eeeEEEEeeeEEEEEeeeEEE…. “Mike, I can’t SEE the river, this is impossible!” “I know, that’s why I have you do it.”<\/p>\n
My stalls are good. I don’t tend to maintain coordination perfectly, particularly in power-on banked stalls, but I can react to a wing dropping off just fine, and I can recover in less than 100ft in a power-off stall and not lose any altitude in a power on stall.<\/p>\n
Quick power on stalls still weird me out a bit. I find myself bracing for the inevitable yet unpredictable break. I haven’t gotten used to the feeling of the plane just snapping to some weird attitude with the ground taking up my whole field of view while I consciously have to fight the temptation to apply opposite aileron. I’m not really scared per se, it just feels a little like bracing yourself for a shot with a hypodermic needle. It’s gonna hurt, but you don’t know EXACTLY when or where or how much.<\/p>\n
My steep turns are okay. I can maintain altitude within 100ft although not as smoothly as I’d like. Mike covered up the Altimeter, and I found that actually helped me maintain altitude. Kept me from staring at the bloody thing in anticipation of it pronouncing failure.<\/p>\n
My landings still suck. They’re safe enough, but I need practice. I have a hard time seeing the needed wind correction. I keep thinking I’m straight when I’m not, and keep trying to hold the centerline with the rudder pedals instead of the ailerons. I did three landings today… I was a little side-loaded on the first two, but got the vertical part right. For the third, I finally got the wind correction right just before I plopped down on the runway (although rather upwind of centerline), unfortunately I wound up a little high and slow and simply dropped the plane from about 8 feet for a rather nice bounce. I just need lots of practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s ridiculous. All I need to solo is a 3,000 foot ceiling, 5 miles visibility, and less than 18 knots of wind including gust factor. And it seems like it’s never going to happen. It’s either cloudy or windy. This morning it was cloudy AND windy for a change. The winds aren’t supposed to get…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonclassified-nonsense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","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=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}