DAY 6
Bit of an interesting one today....
All the procedures, manouevres etc up to now have all been pretty much similar to the PPL but with tolerances tightened up and sometimes slightly different approaches to recovery (stalls etc). Today I was introduced to a new one - yippee!!
Ladies and Gentlemen, may I introduce....
STEEP GLIDING TURNS
It does exactly what it says on the tin, ie a steep gliding turn!
Firstly you put yourself into an 80kt glide (for those of you that fly warriors/arrows - yes you ARE dropping like a brick!) turn into 30 degrees bank, allow speed to increase to 85kts, then bank to 45 degress, allow speed to increase to 90 kts. At this point Bob asked me to roll out on a particular heading and height....
So roll back to 30 degrees, allow speed to drop to 85 kts, then while rolling back to wings level (and allowing speed to decrease to 80 kts), you need to make sure you roll out onto the heading asked and to be at the level assigned as well!
Not one of the easiest manouvres I can tell you
but damn it feels good when you get it right!
DAY 7
Back in the sim practising some VOR/ADF tracking, a couple of times Mike my instructor paused the flight.... a pretty odd feeling - one minute I was flying along intercepting & tracking and the next I was simply hovering.... is this how chopper jockeys feel all the time?
It was good to be able to pause the flight as Mike had time to explain some points which would help my flying and have my full attention - unlike in the aircraft where you're usually busy with flying the plane and only a little info goes in, or when your back on the ground debriefing where you've forgotten a lot about the flight as you're exhausted if its been a difficult flight!
We did a fair bit of ADF tracking and Mike taught me some pretty cool tricks...
Keep yourself (the plane) between the wind and the needle - helps with wind correction, and things like by how much and in which direction to take a cut at the needle to bring it to where you want, little pointers but worth their weight in gold to stop you 'chasing the needle'.
Right at the end of the session Mike asked me to turn right to track the 350 bearing from the beacon, considering I was already tracking the 000 bearing from the beacon this would have meant turning through a full 350 degrees.... with a confused look on my face I pointed this out to Mike who jumped up out of his seat (a pretty difficult thing for him especially as he's got his leg in a cast at the moment) and shouted "YES!"
I was even more confused by his reaction and he said "I know you understand it now - that trick usually tells me whether you know what you're doing or not".
With a big smile on my face now, and time for lunch before my flight in the afternoon I was feelin pretty happy with my progress!
(For those interested, I decided on the Full english - eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, mushrooms, toast & a mug of tea from the clubhouse..... cooked to perfection, tasted lovely (thanks Donna
) but I think Bob would have preffered it if I hadn't had the beans and eggs!!!
)
In the afternoon we did a Nav excercise to Gt Oakley and an unknown diversion...
Nothing much to report apart from make sure you do your homework the night/hour before and PLAN PLAN PLAN! You're told with plenty of time where you're off to, so make sure you know/write down the frequencies you need, waypoints, wind, and most importantly.... if you haven't been to your destination before, make sure you know what kind of runway(s), which direction(s) etc etc, it doesnt look very good when you're looking around for an airfield and you dont really know what you're looking for!
The diversion took us back to Thurrock- again try to get as much planning done in the air, at the least draw a line, halfway point, work out distance, eta... I found the CPM 1 nav ruler most helpful with this part!!!
After reaching my diversion Bob got out the screens and we did some Instrument flying - brilliant timing I thought as we went back over a lot of the stuff I had done with Mike in the sim that morning.
I'd like to applaud the instructors for this what may seem like a minor point to most.... a lot of schools would just book you in to do (A) with sim instructor X, and on the same day for you to fly and practise (B) with flight instructor Y, neither lesson is relevant to the other but it fits in with the instructors timetables and is easy for them to do etc etc. At Stapleford I've found that the student is the priority, the instructors talk to each other, and lessons are planned between the sim & aircraft in such a way that you get to consolidate your knowledge either from the sim to aircraft or vice versa as soon as possible which helps you to learn far more effectively!
DAY 8
Two more Nav Ex's - first one to Lamberhurst, diversion to Eastchurch. Second one to Chilham village (VERY hard to spot - look for the castle!!!) and diversion to Brands Hatch.
Decided to get off my ar@# and fill my logbook out properly - something I was dreading until Sandra in reception gave me a convienient print out of all my hours! It had my hours, a/c type, times, registrations - everything I needed to fill out my log book correctly.... Ta Sandra and another gold star for you guys!
DAY 9
Instrument flying with the screens up in the morning which I enjoyed.....
Its great when the plane behaves, the wind is light, the thermals are non existent, the trim works perfectly and you can sit back and just watch it all happen nice and slowly...
HOWEVER - I fu@#ed up pretty spectacularly on the way back, instead of tracking to LAM VOR/DME with the needle centred with the TO flag showing, I decided to centre the needle with the FROM flag showing.... (this means you're tracking away from the beacon rather than to it... DOH!) I could see the distance increasing on the DME and it took me a few (LONG!) seconds to work out why the hell they were doing that when it dawned on me - lesson learnt, NEVER get too relaxed when instrument flying, one little mistake and you could end up heading off in the opposite direction!
Some more sim in the afternoon where we did some limited panel flying and the VOR approach into Stapleford.
DAY 10
Was looking forward to today as I was getting into the new Arrow... floppy prop, retractable gear, fuel injection, fairly new so a nice new modern interior, new cockpit controls and layout, Garmin GPS, electric trim & autopilot... mmmmmmm!
Unfortunately the plane I was booked into showed a noticeable oil leak when I was doing the A-check and therefore decided to tech the plane. The engineers came to take a look immediately and diagnosed a faulty sump plug which would be replaced immediately - hurrah for on site maintainance!
Whilst this was being done Bob suggested we not waste time as it was such a lovely day to fly, and jump into one of the spare Arrows and go and do some general handling (nothing much to report there, everything pretty standard although I was a lot better at steep gliding turns!)
On our return we saw that our original shiny new Arrow was back on the apron and ready to go - now you dont get that kind of service at Kwik-Fit!
After a spot of lunch (a simple cheese salad baguette, no eggs or beans obviously but some pretty strong onion breath for Bob to enjoy today....) we were due to do circuits, so we jumped into the plane, did all our instrument checks, power checks, taxi checks etc and was all ready and lined up at the end of the runway where I went through the usual crew take off brief... rotate at 70, climb at 80 then 90 etc etc etc. We then lined up ready for departure, held the Arrow on the brakes at 2000rpm, made sure all t's and p's were in the green and away we went!
As soon as we were rolling, I was checking the t's & p's, saw the Airspeed Indicator 'come alive' and watched it rise... 20kts... 30kts... 40kts... 40kts... 40kts... It wasnt rising and we were barrelling down the runway! As a gross error check the warrior usually rotates before the halfway mark on the runway and we were stiil (apparantly) at 40kts! Time to abort the take off so throttle closed, and bring the aircraft to a stop on the runway as quickly as possible! As we were taxying back to the hangers something came to light - none of the planes had pitot covers on them whilst parked! This might not have even been the problem but it rammed the message of safety into my head - if the AI was underreading due to something getting into the pitot while it was parked as there was no cover, this could have caused a pretty major problem for lets say a PPL first solo student who might have panicked.... the results could be pretty bad
So a pretty eventful day I would say!
In all fairness to Stapleford, planes
do go tech - its the nature of the beast, and hats off to the engineers on site who fixed the original problem straightaway in order to get the flight schools' planes in the air again
- not something that would happen at a lot of other flight schools due to there being no maintainance on site or engineers being too busy or needing too many tea breaks! But if the afternoons problem could have been averted by the use of some pitot covers, in the name of safety and avoiding a potentially very dangerous situation, maybe a job lot for all the planes wouldn't go amiss!
All in all, I'm still VERY happy with my choice of Stapleford, the staff are fab, the instructors are great, the reception staff are very helpful, the clubhouse is fantastic, the engineers pull out all the stops and the planes are very very good!