=============================================================================== LOG ENTRY - 21-SEP-2011 Matt Borland Flight: 21 - 21-SEP-2011 - 1.2 hr - Touch-and-goes Depart: KCOS ~1130 Arrive: KCOS ~1142 =============================================================================== A lot has happened since my last entry...I am slowly improving but still feel like a complete newbie. Right now my instructor is getting me ready to do my first solo flight. This has caused both excitement as well as apprehension. It's less that I'm worried about doing things alone, as it is that I am just not completely confident in my landing ability. I'm sure I can get the plane to the runway safely, but I'm not in great command of the plane post-flare. It's been a long road; my instructor wanted me to solo earlier this month, but I still haven't had a day where I feel good enough to do it. One day was lost to weather; another day was slotted for my 'stage check' with the chief pilot. For the stage check, I went up with probably the most experienced pilot in the club (he flew F-105s in Vietnam and had earned more than 2000 jet hours by 1966). To some degree this took some pressure off because there was no way I could impress him. My goal was to show that I could basically handle the plane and do so safely. On my ride, we performed some basic air work (steep turns, power-on and power-off stalls) and then did some landings. For each of my landings, my base and final legs were both quite fast and short; upon reflection it was because the wind was pushing me from behind and to the side. You generally don't want a tailwind on landing, but this tailwind was sort of an abberation and wasn't reading where the windsock was placed. I was sort of relieved when the chief pilot took us in for the final landing and attempted a short-field landing, only to find himself off-target due to the stray tailwind. The following week I was prepared to fly solo, but the first day there was a little bit of rain and wind and my instructor just wanted to see me make some landings in preparation for soloing the next day. The next day I started early in the morning, with beautiful weather, but I didn't show great landings and sadly didn't really improve on them. My approaches were generally OK, but after the flare I wasn't really controlling the plane the way I should. I really was looking forward to soloing but made the decision that I wasn't happy enough with the landings to try them on my own. I was really frustrated that my landings were poor and spent the next couple days wading through a lot of doubt and self-reproach. Luckily I seem to have emerged from that mental state and reminded myself of a few things. First, that the way you work through difficulty is through resolve; you resolve that you have both the will and ability to see the task through. Second, I have a way of automatically raising the bar on myself and so any frustration is self-imposed. Being frustrated will only slow the process. Finally, I have to accept that at least for a while I may just have to tolerate not being all that great: I may be behind the curve at times, but if I'm resolved to see this training through, then it doesn't actually matter how long it takes (cue 'Run, Fat Boy, Run'). Yesterday the weather wasn't great, sort of a bad crosswind on all runways for practicing a lot of landings, so we did air work 'under the hood.' The hood is a visor of sorts that you strap to your head that prevents you from seeing out the window. This is used to force you to use only the instruments, and accumulates hours toward your simulated instrument time which is a requirement for a VFR pilot's license. VFR stands for Visual Flight Regulations and is compared with IFR, or Instrument Flight Regulations. VFR pilots still need to know how to fly with instruments primarily so that if you find yourself in a cloud, you can perform basic maneuvers that will help navigate you back to a visual environment (out of the clouds). The hood is surprisingly effective at removing you visually from the outside world. For about 45 minutes I was flying the plane without much assistance from the instructor and without any outside visual references. When your ability to see outside is hampered, you perform different air work than you would typically perform. To turn you perform 'standard turns' which are shallow (10-15 degree bank) turns that are accomplished by following the turn indicator instrument. This ensures a steady rate of turn, meaning that if done correctly you will complete a 360 degree turn in two minutes. So, if you find youself in a cloud, to go back you would engage a standard turn and turn for exactly one minute, placing you at 180 degrees to the direction you had just been in. We practiced unusual attitude recovery as well. For this my instructor would take the controls, have me close my eyes completely, put the plane into an unusual attitude then have me open my eyes and recover. On recovery, you look at two things. First, you read the airspeed indicator (or alternately hear the change in pitch of the engine) and if airspeed is increasing you cut the throttle; conversely if you are losing airspeed you put in full throttle. Second, you look at the attitude indicator and make the necessary corrections to put yourself into a proper attitude. I am sure that there are many people that do not like this; however I liked it quite a lot actually. For one thing, I got to feel the plane operating under unusual attitudes, which of course you don't want to most of the time, but it gave me the feeling of 'yes, I can correct this.' It was actually a little exhilarating for me to have my eyes closed and hear the engine either fight the climb or absorb some of the descent, and feel the plane roll, and know that I would have to recover. It didn't take very long to correct the plane's attitude any of the times we tried it; if anything I took longer than I would need to as I didn't want to yank too hard on the yoke at high speed. As part of these exercises we also did some testing of my inner ear. I would shut my eyes and try to flight straight and level, or try to perform some sort of level turn. After a certain point, your sense of balance is thrown out and you can't sustain a true level configuration. However, there are several things you can do to keep yourself from losing control. You can listen to the engine and pretty easily determine if there is acceleration or deceleration. This can keep your pitch fairly level. However, your roll is harder to determine if you are in coordinated flight. You will feel no particular shift or slide even if you are at a pretty decent bank. My instructor would at some point tell me to recover, at which I open my eyes and perform the recovery procedures. In each case I didn't have too bad of a pitch and mostly just had a bit of a roll. I took the plane most of the way back to the airport under the hood, and when I was told to take it off, the world shone back very beautifully around me. I had been missing out on a very beautiful, if windy, day. For my flight today, the winds were a little high: 180 (from the south) at 11 knots gusting up to 19 knots. In addition the winds and gusts shifted quite a lot. My instructor wanted to know if I still wanted to do landing practice and I said that I did. I wanted to get more experience with the dynamic aspects that were present. Today I was resolved to handle every bit as much of the radio as possible, and part of that was to make sure that if I didn't hear or understand a radio call to me, to just say "say again." This is a simple and necessary act, but it was actually a little difficult for me early on to admit I didn't fully hear something. I got to use it today; as I was taking off the tower had some static as they called our traffic pattern (left or right, couldn't tell). A simple "niner niner november say again" fixed that. I notice that a lot of the old timers if they don't hear you will put a hand to an ear and say "say again?" Today I felt much more comfortable flying than I had for a while. I had expressly decided to not drink coffee before flying and I believe it actually paid off. I think that unless I have a large breakfast the coffee makes me a little too jittery. Lesson learned. I was doing OK with most of my landing work, except that I apparently was having some control issues after my flare. I talked about it with my instructor afterwards and think that it may be a combination of things. First, I may be focusing too close to maintaining center line...not looking far enough ahead. As a result I may be making too large of corrections trying to maintain center line. Also, I am probably not quite reacting properly and quickly enough to variable wind. For example, if I am right of centerline but crabbed a little left into the wind, to maintain straight centerline I need to use left aileron to roll back to the left, but use right rudder to yaw to parallel the center line. I think I was instead trying to wander back to the center by yawing more to the left. As a result I confused my instructor because I was putting in left rudder when he wanted right rudder. So I'm hoping that I can keep those insights in mind and react better next time. I was glad to have done these landings with the variable wind; it gave me the opportunity to better recognize that at all times flying is a dynamic situation and I believe in many ways it forced me to think and react better (despite the issues I listed above). So, looking forward to flying again soon!