6th Lesson

Yesterday I had my 6th lesson. It's starting to become somewhat routine now. Again I did the takeoff, and I was able to hold the runway center line a lot better this time. Today we focused on ground reference maneuvers. A wind determination was done by flying along a north-south road and observing drift, then flying along an east-west road and observing drift. There was a light wind out of the north-north-west, about 5-6kt, but I don't think it was really enough to get the feel for the wind correction necessary. First, Jim had me work on a rectangular pattern by picking out a few intersecting roads and some power lines to define our rectangle. The goal of this maneuver is to trace a rectangle on the ground and maintain a consistent distance outside of a rectangle defined by landmarks on the ground. I didn't have much trouble with this - the hardest part for me really was picking the rectangle on the ground to follow. There was enough wind where a slight crab into the wind was required in the base and crosswind legs, but the effect was subtle. Next, we worked on circling a point. Same idea here - you pick a point on the ground, and then attempt to fly around it in a constant-radius circle, compensating for the wind during various portions of the circle by varying your bank angle. This wasn't too difficult either - but then again, the wind was fairly light. For our final ground reference maneuver, we did some s-turns. This is when you pick a straight line on the ground that is perpendicular to the wind direction, like a road, and you fly the plan in a "wave" along the road, making semi-circles of equal radius on each side of the road as you progress down the road in one direction. The downwind portions of the path require steeper bank angle, and the upwind portions require less. This is going to take some practice. I was able to do it "okay", but there's a lot to pay attention to in this maneuver. Trying to keep your airspeed and altitude fairly consistent while constantly changing the bank angle, AND trying to align with landmarks on the ground was a bit challenging. I was able to do it "okay", but I wouldn't say my performance was stellar. More practice required. The examiner will pick one of these three ground reference maneuvers during the checkride, so I need to be prepared for any of them. Next, we climbed up and practiced some more 720 steep turns. Also, Jim had me do a 360 degree turn with 60 degrees of bank. 2Gs during a 60 degree banked turn, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Lost a little altitude, but not too much. Next, we headed over to the Osceola airport in Wisconsin (KOEO) and did a touch-and-go there. I did most of the landing, and we turned on the pilot controlled lighting. It was cool to see a better-equipped airport - a paved runway and a Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI). Taking off on the paved runway is a breeze compared to the turf field. We returned back to 25D at cruise speed and did a straight-in landing. After the lesson, we went inside and I took Jim's practice knowledge test. I got 100%, and received his endorsement to take the private pilot knowledge test. I'm going to schedule the real test at Cirrus at the Anoka/Blaine airport. Hopefully I will get that behind me this week sometime. Next lesson is tomorrow afternoon.