Tabula rasa

Well, almost. It’s been over a month (closer to 6 weeks already) since I have flown last time. Many reasons, one result – need to start from scratch. OK, I remembered how to do the preflight, I also didn’t have problem with taxiing airplane to the fuel pump. Checklist, communication, procedures – all were more or less where they supposed to be.

The flying itself was almost completely gone. Slight pressure on the yoke when elevator gains authority, stiffness of rudder when air starts to flow over it with speed, lack of vibrations when you rotate and wheels no longer roll over the bumpy runway. Finally the sensation in you stomach when your body realize that there is additional, vertical plane in which now we will be moving to much more extent and suddenness than it happens when we are walking or driving on the ground. All those thing where very, very vague and I needed to re learn them again.

Partially because of that, partially because of weather we went south to the practice area to redo all the basics – climbs, descents, s-turns and turns around the point. All I can say is… rubbish! Man I forgot almost everything. Luckily I forgot my GPS tracker today so there will be no picture you can laugh at, but there is a lot of work to redo. It’s probably safe to say, that during those 6 weeks of no flying I moved back in my training about 1 to 1.5h of flight training in my skills. Adding it to similar loss before when I was forced to switch planes I’m probably closer to 10 hours point in my training than to actual metered time. I’ll just have to pay a little bit more for my training.

On the positive side – during my time off the Cherokee went to the shop and they replaced stabilator trailing edge (I just learned it’s called anti servo tab) and straightened and tuned ailerons. Now this bird fly! Almost as smooth as it was with C172. Definitely a bright point int his whole mess called Tomasz’s flight training .

Later in the flight we did some simulated instrument flight conditions. One huge difference – in low wings you really don’t feel when you start banking left or right – it caused much more pain this time to flight straight. Other than that – 70h in x-plane still pay off – almost no problems with flying without seeing earth. Other than not knowing where I was at all. But orientation and navigation is later in the training syllabus so for now I have to trust Terry that we are flying in more or less good direction. Surely, when I took off the hood IA24 materialized just in front of me. Quick good by call to Cedar Rapids Approach and we were in the pattern.

Landing. Nothing really worth to mention other than I’m really, really glad I remembered all steps needed to do a good one. Fuel pump, flaps, call outs, distances all were there. Speed were not though. Today I went on the lower side – 70-75mph is not what this bird likes to see on the final so I was going a little bit short. Small burst of power and we were back on the slope, but this is the point I should pay much more attention next time. Dead on 80mhp is my goal. Mother nature (in the presence of trees and slight turbulence over the runway threshold) made sure that I won’t make my first landing again. Sharp swing to the right and again I was paying more attention to staying in the center line of our huge (30ft wide) runway than to the process of making good flare. Terry took care of it. Again. I’m wandering when I’ll be able to land without him on board. Oh well…

Bottom line: fly as often as you can – you can save a lot of time and money this way.

1.2h/0.4h inst : 1 to/ldg logged
13.1h/0.8h inst : 40 to/ldg total