Bull riding

Finally weather allowed us to do some flying. It was almost like learning everything from beginning. Preflight on knees, stabilator, fuel level check possible without a ladder. It took me a little bit more to do thorough check. Plus the feeling that my previous aircraft went down just a week ago made me look at everything twice.

So we have preflight (with some filling up) done. Time to go flying. First observation – wow, I see everything. Well, other than ground so I have to be careful when I taxi to not drive of the pavement. In our airport it’s really easy as taxiway is no wider that single lane and the runway itself resembles local road more then anything. One note on taxiing – the Cherokee has direct connection between rudder pedals and front wheel so turning is much more direct yet it demands much more power to push. Also all bumps on the road are transmitted straight to your feet without any dampening so you have this feeling of aircraft constantly kicking your like it wanted to punish you for taxiing too long.

We stopped at the end of the runway 33 to make some final checks and finally take off for the first time since early February. Mixture full rich, carburetor heat cold, aux fuel pump on, primer closed and locked, brake released, full power and off we go. Well not really. Despite much bigger power this bird is taking off at much higher speed (N9832G had STOL kit installed) so ground roll takes more or less the same distance as it did in Cessna 172. It also needs much more pressure on the controls* so it took quite a workout to make it fly. It was a little bit in contrary of what I’ve heard about Pipers but as Terry says – it’s not the Piper harder to fly – it was the Cessna exceptionally easy and eager to.

I’ll skip you description of the whole flight instead of putting some notes (mostly to myself) about how it went.

First and the most important – gosh this baby is so trim sensitive! I was finding myself constantly turning that knob above my head and still flying all over the altimeter. The fact that it has pass trough zone on the tachometer didn’t help at all – it was quite a work load to make this bird fly straight and level. On the positive note – additional power (N9179J has 180 horses) makes this thing climb beautifully (as much as a spam can can climb so). Also it’s much faster then C172 – apparently much cleaner construction pays.

Second note – mu body completely forgot how it looks like up there – steep turns were much more like a steep turning descents than level turns. But what really caught me by surprise is the amount of lift I had each time I came out from one of those – apparently (I admit I didn’t have time to look) I was getting much speed when in turn which then was quickly transformed into altitude when I leveled. Wait a second – I’ve just extracted those s-turns (one left, one right from the GPS track.

Left picture shows more or less vertical cut, right photo shows view from the top. Plane was flying from the left to the right. As you see you have to have very good imagination to even see a circle there! Again practice makes perfect. I hope next time it will look much better.

Stalls. Especially power on stalls are easy on this one. Thanks to wind inclination it starts to shake when you still have quite a margin and even when you still pull that yoke it stalls without any sensations, just let the yoke return to it’s neutral position and you’re done. Cherokee grabs some speed and levels off almost by itself. Side note – stall speeds are much closer to the landing speeds than in Cessna so one has to be much more careful while working the pattern.

At the end of the lesson did one take off. Nothing changed here – I still can’t land. It will be even harder in this one – low wing meas much more powerful ground effect – you have to be really careful not to balloon. Struts in landing gear doesn’t make it any easier. They seem to work much worse than in C172.

So the bottom line is that although I didn’t forget anything I learned so far about flying, unexpected bird change makes it whole new experience once again. Like riding wild bull vs. small pony. But I’m quite happy – Cherokee is the best substitute of a high performance aircraft training I can get at this stage. When I master it both flying Cessnas and learning complex aircrafts like Arrow will be piece of cake.

See you next time. Have a good time up there and fly safe.

* it turned out that there was something wrong with the airplane’s left aileron. Terry had to use full right yaw trim and it still wanted tu turn left by itself. I hope they will fix it before next time.

1.1h : 2 to/ldg logged
9.8h : 28 to/ldg total