Spatial disorientation
What a day. Today was one of those light when we were supposed to finish some things hanging above my heads like slow flight maneuvers, simulated instrument flight, simulated emergency landings and recovery from unusual attitudes. Everything went smooth with two exceptions. One not really wort mentioning is that the stall horn got stuck. First it got stuck on for quite some time after first try, it went off above 100mph. Then when it went oft it stayed off for the rest of the flight. That made all stalls quite… interesting. And that actually in my opinion is a good thing. Now I know much more about how Cherokee behaves in a stall than I would having the horn working properly. You see with horn working you push the plane to the point when horn goes off and than a little. But without it I really had to pay attention to what is going on as there was no light that would tell me when the stall is going to occur. Unfortunately the mechanic will take care of the horn today and everything should be back to normal tomorrow.
The other thing that still didn’t let me go is spatial disorientation. After we flew under the hood for about 25 minutes Terry took the control, asked me to close my eyes and tried to confuse me. First to tries were rather mild and I had no problem with selecting and performing proper control inputs to stabilize the plane. Nothing really worth mentioning other than I for the very first time saw the plane flying well in the yellow arc. But then Terry tried for the third time and that hit me really hard. He was much more aggressive on the controls and I my inner ear was really confused. What hit me hard is how much time I needed to recover. I opened my eyes and was looking at the instruments. And I was seeing the needles. And yet it took good 5 seconds before my brain woke up and started to actually work. I really didn’t expect this. I was expecting that I’ll have a hard time believing what instruments are telling me. None of that happened. I was so confused that I didn’t even try to figure out what my but feels, I just looked at the needles. And yet it took so much time before I was able to react, lower the nose, add power and level the wings. Actually for the rest of the flight and quite some time after it I felt a little bit dizzy. It was the very first time when I drove maybe 35mph home despite the 55mph limit. I just didn’t feel like I can drive faster. Every thing was still shaken badly.
Time to look for some aerobatics workout to condition my body 
1.3h/0.5h inst : 1 to/ldg logged
58.7h/2.5h inst : 301 to/ldg total
