Hi everyone,
A bit of a disappointing 2 days. The instructor yesterday was sick so I didn’t get to fly. This had a knock-on effect for today, therefore I only did a 1.5 hour flight. I was with a new instructor called Elizabeth. She was instructing PPLs when I was here last in November, and since then she now does CPL instruction and she also is a CAA Flight Examiner.
So we took off, and climbed out to the north west and we practiced the stalls first. So stall number one she said she wasn’t too happy with as it wasn’t fully developed. She explained that some examiners will give you a signal when to recover and others want you to make up your own mind. Turning stall was okay, and landing configuration stall was also okay.
Back to steep turns – one left and one right. We got thrown all over the sky with the thermals, but all turns were within 100 ft, which she said was all within the limits given. I think the examiner would be slightly relaxed with the 100 ft limits on a day like today, as it’s even hard to hold straight and level.
We did some instrument flying, position fixes and tracking radials. She also gave me an engine fire whilst under the hood. I had to do an emergency descent to MSA to which we broke out of cloud and execute an emergency landing.
Elizabeth also showed me gliding turns, and the principles of adding 1 knot to your airspeed for every degree past 30 you turn. Typically these are completed over large fields to loose height.
So we tracked the 270 radial back to Ormond. It’s hard to write down the ATIS when your being bumped up and down 500 fpm. There was nobody else in the circuit and we were given clearance to land almost straight away.
So I’ve got 6.3 hours total now, and I’m moving onto navigation tomorrow. I have asked to transition over to the Arrow at 15 hours instead of 20 as it will give me a little more time to get relaxed in it.
Talk tomorrow,
Andrew