Lesson 4

I've had another long period of no flying. This time it was because of work and vacation. But I went flying today.



Reading my last post, I see that I mentioned how nice a day it was for my last flight. This day was even nicer. The heat of Summer is gone and today was the first cool morning of the season. For most of the flight, the air was as smooth as glass. But I'm getting ahead of myself.



I think I have the preflight checks down. We did that uneventfully and then had a very hard time starting the motor. We finally got it started and then I taxied to the runup area. We did our runup checks, got our tower clearance, and I taxied onto the runway and throttled up to full and we took off. CFI had me pulling back on the yoke to take off and I guess I was again too timid with it. But we got into the air and made our turn on course. It was then that I noticed how easy it was to maintain course and altitude. The plane wasn't getting bounced around at all.



When we arrived in the practice area, I made some 20-degree turns and held altitude pretty well. Then we did some slow flight. It was easier than last time, probably because of the calm air. I held altitude well and even did a couple of shallow turns. Then, we did stalls, power on and off. Recovering was pretty easy but I'm a little worried that I'm not really feeling the expected control buffet. That was all review of last time. I noticed that I had to really haul back on the control yoke to get it to stall. It was pretty tough to hold it back for that long.



Then I did some steep turns. Again, I was able to hold altitude well and even felt my own turbulence when I completed the turn, having gone full-circle. So the maneuvers were a lot easier for me this time.



Then we did some S-turns. I found the arcs to be smaller than I was expecting. And we finished up with turns around a point. This one was tough for me because I wasn't able to hold altitude well at all.



That was it. We called it a day, and I flew back to the airfield. The temperature came up while I was doing my maneuvers and it was becoming ever more turbulent. By the time we approached the field, we were getting bounced around a lot. It was hard to line up on the runway and we were all over the place. It made for an interesting few final seconds and a relatively solid touchdown.



So overall, it was a good day, I didn't regress after such a long layoff, and it was just plain fun.