5th Lesson

Well, I managed to get another ground school lesson in this week during the afternoons and evenings after work. Went over Performance, Weight and Balance. This was fairly straight forward, and I found myself thinking back to the ideal gas law from college chemistry class. It's another nice and sunny February day here in Minnesota. The highs have generally been up around freezing and some days it has been a little higher, so there is some thawing going on. The ice patch in front of the hanger was a little more brittle today, so it didn't slip me up as much. Looking forward to that thing being gone. Preflight was as usual. I didn't really have any questions for Jim today from the material, so we didn't spend much time talking theory before we went flying. The checklists are starting to become more routine at this point, and I'm getting to the point where I'm running through the procedures without much input from Jim. Winds were very light today, maybe a knot or two out of the north. Jim was fine taking off on either runway, but I wanted to do runway 31 to get some more practice taxiing. I'm feeling very comfortable with the taxiing now, and doing the U turn off the side of the runway to turn around. For today's takeoff, I did the whole thing, and Jim was effectively hands-(and feet)-off. I think I'll need a little more practice keeping it on the center line, but I was happy with how the takeoff went. After climbing to 3500ft, we practiced some more stalls. I did a few power-off stalls in clean configuration, a few with full flaps, and I also did a couple power-on stalls. Jim also demonstrated a turning stall. Then we practiced flying a traffic pattern with go-arounds for missed approaches out over a cornfield somewhere. After this, Jim had me try some slips. This is when you apply rudder in one direction, and aileron in the other. The effect is that the plane is pointing in one direction, say to the right, but the direction of travel is straight ahead, or even to the left. The purpose of this maneuver is to increase drag, which increases your rate of descent without increasing your airspeed. It can be useful if you have an electrical failure and cannot extend your flaps, or if your flaps are already extended and you need to descend even faster for some reason. You REALLY have to jam your foot down on the pedal to get full right or left rudder. After this, Jim had me target a specific air speed while he would change the throttle settings. We probably did this for 10 minutes or so. I think the purpose of this exercise is to help you start to instinctively associating the appropriate changes in pitch to bring about changes in airspeed. Jim also had me practice some power-off descending turns at specific airspeeds. Next, we practiced some ground tracking. We would pick out a road or set of powerlines and I would try to follow them by sighting along the step on the strut out the left window. The winds were fairly light, but we did have a slight northerly wind, so I was able to see that it was necessary to point the plane slightly upwind to track straight along the ground. Jim also had me follow a curvy road on the ground, which was interesting. When we headed back to the airport, Jim had enter the normal traffic pattern and perform the landing. At Jim's direction, I did basically the entire landing, except he guided me in the flair. I felt like it was a really productive lesson, and I'm starting to see some progression in my ability at this point, which is encouraging. Jim has indicated Monday's lesson is going to focus heavily on ground reference maneuvers, and he wants me to read up on them. I'm going to knock out the rest of the ground school this weekend, and we're planning on have me take Jim's practice test on Monday for the knowledge test endorsement. If all goes well, hopefully I'll take the knowledge test sometime next week. I've also got three lesson scheduled next week, so I should make a lot of progress. Still lovin' it.