Up, Up and Away

#4 and still alive!

Trying to keep work from interfering with my flying has become more and more difficult. Even my weekend appointments have gotten messed up with work related stuff.....so when I had a chance to get in the air this morning, I jumped at it. The ceiling was about 4500 overcast and we had a little wind (5 mph or so) quartering rwy 20. So, I figured what the heck. Let's get it going.

Preflight - You know...you do something enough times, it starts to make sense. The preflight has become less of a mental checklist of things to do and more of an look-over of the things I feel I need to check. What I mean is that the flow of the preflight is starting to make sense. I'm not checking things now just to mark them off the list, but because I know that I need/want to check them. It's a small, but important milestone.

Up until this point, I've felt that overwhelming sensation of "I'll never get this right". Now, by understanding the preflight, no matter how small that may seem, I have realized that it's just a matter of doing it "enough". Preflight "enough" and it gets easy, taxi "enough" and it gets easy, land "enough" and...well, we'll get to that one.

Startup and Taxi - We run the checklist for Pre-Startup and Startup. Kary has this saying that he's drilled into my head: "Needle up, flaps up". What he means by this, is to clean up the flaps when you have confirmed the oil pressure is up after starting the engine. I was ready for this one. I start the engine, idle it at 1000, watch the needle rise and say "needle up, flaps up". HA!...I beat him to it!

Of course, to accomplish this feat of aviation agility, I've been repeating this little saying everytime I started my car for the last 10 days. So, I'm sitting in the driveway, I start my Camry and say outloud "needle up, flaps up"............my kids just stare at me.......the car idles..........my kids look at each other.........I grin at them "they think I'm cool", I think...........my six year old makes an "L" (for "Loser") with her fingers and puts it on her forehead.............a dog barks in the distance.

Back in the cockpit, my mind is running the checklist. Everything ready, we start taxiing, check the brakes and keep on towards runway 20. I've *almost* exorcised the demon of Otis the drunk from my feet. I can keep the yellow line between the wheels now....and talk at the same time! yippee another milestone :)

Take-off - Before we started up, Kary told me that we'd be doing mostly pattern work today. Just touch-and-go after touch-and-go. This is the first time that we have really worked on landings in a concentrated manner, so I'm somewhat pumped about it......and somewhat nervous....and somewhat thinking I'll make a good passenger during this phase of training. We climb out, turn crosswind and downwind. Because the wind has picked up a bit, we've got a pretty good tailwind on downwind (of course, I guess your SUPPOSED to have a tailwind on downwind...hrm). And we go through the paces.

At the numbers, Mixture Rich, Carb Heat on, power back and start bringing in flaps. And did I mention that I'm supposed to do ALL that?!?!? Isn't that why we have co-pilots? Geez. Anyway, I figure out that Kary is trying to train me so that he doesn't have to do ANYTHING. I think he might be a tad lazy.

We turn Final, call it in and make a picture perfect carrier approach. I figure only wusses land with less than 1000 ft/min descent rates. Of course, Kary is on the controls all the way down and we manage a nice little thud. Clean it up, carb heat in and here we go again.

At this point, I come to terms with the fact that this whole "left turning tendancy" business that we've been training for is , in fact, true. And I start learning about how much right rudder it takes to correct for a diagonal departure. We climb out, hit pattern altitude and do it again.

After about three of these, I'm still fighting the rudders like I'm Michael Flatly. Kary takes the plane around the pattern once and lets me "feel" how he is doing it. Then I get it. I've been "under-over-controlling" (Kary just looked at me on this one too....I waited for the "loser" symbol, but he refrained). What I meant by that is that I have been waiting too long before putting in rudder (sometimes just fractions of a second), so that when I did put in rudder, I was having to put in a LOT of rudder and then it was often too much.

So, I figured out the best way for me to do it is to actually have both feet on the pedals and actually put light pressure on both at the same time. Pushing against myself. Not enough that will cause me to cramp up after landing, just enough to "feel" what the rudder is trying to do on its own. Then my adjustments came in smaller, quicker inputs. I like this. It's starting to make sense to me now.

We manage a few more landings, with the overcast coming down and the crosswind picking up a tad. With each approach, I was able to do a little more and a little more. The "feel" of what I'm doing with the plane is starting to happen. Like I mentioned in my last post, spending time in that 20 second window of short final/roundout/flare is where I'm learning the most.

After our last landing, we taxi back and debrief (notice I skipped saying anything about the taxi back??? I'm that good ;) ).

One thing that this lesson really rang my bell on was that I can control the plane down to the inches (or closer). I don't really know what my frame of thinking before was, but I had this idea that there was a realm of "uncontrollability" or a "margin of error" in how well you could make the plane do what you wanted. This may make no sense. I don't think I ever tried to put it in words or spent any time really thinking about it. But with this lesson, there was a sense of control that I never had before. Now, the amount of actual control I had is something Kary will have to share with you.

1 hour down and the fun is just starting....

Was a good lesson.

jf

posted by Jeff Franks @ 6:00 PM