Landing, Stalling, and Raining

I've managed to get in 4 lessons since my last post. Today, my flight instructor and I did some ground school since the cloud layer was at 1400 feet. For those of you not familiar with the flight certification process, the first certificate you get is for VFR flight. This means that flying through clouds is verboten. You have to either fly 500 feet below the clouds or 1000 feet above the clouds, and 2000 feet to the side of any clouds. Since TPA (traffic pattern altitude) is 1000 feet at Pearson airport, the clouds cannot be any lower than 1500 feet in order to fly. (In addition, you must have visibility of at least 3.5 miles.) It turns out that had I scheduled my lesson in the afternoon, I would have probably been able to go up. We did some ground school and talked about carb icing, instrument malfunctions, and spins.

In the last couple of lessons, we had started practicing power-off stalls. Power-off stalls are supposed to simulate stalling the plane while in the landing pattern. The goal of the exercise is to recover from the stall while losing no more than 100 feet in altitude during the recovery. A power-off stall occurs when you have no throttle (hence the power-off) and flaps extended (since you are simulating a landing). For obvious reasons, you practice this at higher altitudes. In my case, we practiced the stalls at 3000 feet.

Stalls were quite a bit different than I had imagined. First, I thought it would be easy to stall the plane. It wasn't (thankfully). You have to extend full flaps and pull hard on the yoke for what seems like forever. Second, I thought when the plane went into the stall it would be similar to a roller coaster car reaching the zenith of the first hump and it starting to descend down the tracks. The stall itself was not that violent. Of course, maybe I was too busy trying to recover from the stall itself to notice my butt lifting out of the seat.

I recovered from each stall at about 2600 feet. I need to improve that so I lose less than 100 ft. Funny enough, I am losing most of that altitude trying to get the plane to stall in the first place. My instructor says that's because I take too long extending the flaps.

Only one lesson scheduled for next Sunday. But my instructor might be able to see me on Saturday as well. I hope so, because this flying thing is starting to get fun.

How to make a 757 go-around

A winter storm has been hovering over Portland all week. I assumed that the weather was not going to cooperate through the entire weekend and I wouldn't be able to go out. However, when I woke up Sunday morning, the sun was out with partly cloudy skies.

By the time my lesson was about begin, it looked like a couple of storm cells were rolling in. When my flight instructor arrived, she asked me if I wanted to do the pre-flight. Of course! She gave me the plane's log book (all flights and flight hours are recorded in a log book that they use to figure out how long the engine was on so they can figure out how much you owe) and I went out to the plane to begin the pre-flight check.

Part of the pre-flight check is to check to make sure the lights work and lower the flaps for inspection. Since the engine isn't running, the power is coming from the batteries. As I was lowering the flaps, my flight instructor came out and told me that the master switch was on (I guess she could tell since the plane's beacon was on) and told me to turn it off so I didn't drain the batteries. I tried to tell her I was checking the lights and lowering the flaps, but I guess she didn't understand what I was saying. I didn't want to get into an argument over such a small thing, so I turned the master switch off and we started the pre-flight from the beginning. That ended up being a good thing, since what I didn't do when checking the lights was walk around the plane to check to see if the navigation lights on the wings were on. A good lesson learned. We went over a lot of things that we covered last week, which was a good thing. For the pre-flight check, repetition is going to be the key-to-learning.

As we were checking the oil, my flight instructor noticed that a plane was about to takeoff in the wrong direction. When the wind is less than 5 knots, planes are supposed to take off in the same direction as the big commercial planes do at Portland (PDX). Planes were landing going east and this plane was about to takeoff into the west. As he tookoff, there was a United Airlines 757 landing at Portland airport. You could see the 757 change its course. Apparently, all commercial airlines have a collision warning system. If any plane, even a small Cessna, gets within 500 Ft. of the plane, the collision warning will sound and, according to regulations, the plane must abort the landing and go around. That, understandably, pisses commercial pilots off. As the 757 passed overhead, it changed course again and was going to land anyway. The plane passed over the horizon and I don't know if it landed or if it went around. I hope I never cause a commercial plane to have to divert because of some boneheaded move on my part. Once again, I discover another reason to take this hobby very, very seriously.

We finished the pre-flight, and by the time we were ready to takeoff, there were some crosswind to deal with. My flight instructor had control of the yolk and I operated the throttle (which on takeoff is easy...FULL POWER!) . I felt what she was trying to do by turning the ailerons in the direction of the wind to counteract the crosswind component (it turns out all that vector math I learned in high school physics is finally paying off!). As we accelerated, we slowly brought the ailerons even. We were going to fly the traffic pattern at Pearson, but decided to go over to Scappoose airpark and do some touch-and-gos since the weather was better over there.

I'm starting to get a feel for the airplane. I beginning to figure out how much I need to turn the ailerons for a standard turn, or how much throttle I need to give to go to a certain number of RPMs. But the rudders are still foreign to me. It's like learning how to walk and chew gum at the same time (which I've never had a problem with, but patting your head and rubbing your belly has always been difficult for me).

After a few touch and go landings, we flew back to Pearson. We flew through a little rain. That combined with the fact that we had broken clouds and some sunshine, I couldn't see a thing out the window because of the glare off the water on the windshield. What was worse was there was another plane entering the same part of the landing pattern that we wanted to enter. My flight instructor got on the radio and told the other plane that we could not see them. They told us that they were about to enter the base, which was good since we hadn't entered in the downwind portion of the flight pattern yet. I certainly understand why it's important to know where other planes are (Apparently, fender benders at 1000 feet are fatal.) but it sure is hard locating them. A couple of times my flight instructor located planes long before I did. I'm hoping this is a skill that will improve with practice.

I won't be able to fly next week. But after that, I'm going to have two lessons a week, Saturday and Sunday.