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.