Another first
Today was my last solo flight before the checkride. I decided to train the things I’m the lousiest at. At least in my opinion. So I went to practice area and for starters decided to try some steep turns. These are the ones I have the most trouble with keeping the plane withing prescribed altitude limits. Today again I had some problems, but I noticed some progress.
After making two of those I went a little bit up and started the slow flight part of my program. Today was the very, very first time I did stalls solo. I was quite afraid because as probably most of students stalls used to scare me. Terry tried to comfort me saying ‘remember if you feel something is going wrong simply point the nose down and pick up some speed. Keeping that advice in mind I started to slow down. First I tried to fly around at 70mph (which is just above low end of green arc), some turns, some climbs and descents. Having time I played with plane reactions. This was the first time I had chance to practice how the Cherokee is behaving on the back side of power curve. It turned out that to keep 70mph in level flight with full flaps I pretty much have to power it up to 2100rpm. Quite sobering discovery, as it clearly shows that if I ever find myself in that situation on the approach only full power can save my butt and better it was there then. Stalls themselves were quite uneventful. Just a note that during power on approach to the stall I had to limit power to 2000rpm, otherwise I was running out of elevator authority before the actual stall happened and the plane was simply mushing air going slowly down. Power off stalls weren’t that docile. The nose was dropping down instantly and it took some time to pick up the speed before I could pull the nose up and clean the plane. Yet after third or fourth try I was able to do this loosing probably just a bit more than 100 feet. Nice.
I finished the training doing simulated engine out. After I established speed, picked up a place and performed the checklist I waited a bit and leveled off at 2000. Then another set of steep turns (much nicer than first one) and went back to Green Castle.
Now I feel a little more confident that I can handle Mike on Thursday. Tomorrow I have scheduled last dual with Terry to polish my skills again before the checkride. The big day is approaching fast.
1.1h/0.0h inst : 1 to/ldg logged
61.6h/3.1h inst : 308 to/ldg total
