Lesson Three - 19/03/11
Climbing and descending.
Turned up about 4pm on an absolutely gorgeous day for my third lesson. I only rang at 3pm so was really suprised that they managed to fit me in on a sunny, Friday afternoon, with my regular instructor in the same plane as the last two lessons, as every other time I've had an hours notice they've been fully booked.
So we started on the ground brief, and I'm beginning to realise where flying gets interesting. PAT the CAT, PAT the CAT. APT CAT so on and so forth with cruise descents, normal descents, glide descents, set speeds, set RPMs, set attitudes etc etc. That was a big influx for my little head.
So now I'm out checking the aircraft, something I'm comfortable with now, and just to throw a spanner into my plan, I'm told that my instructor would like to give no prompts until we're off the ground. I just about managed it after being told to stand on right rudder a bit more.
The actual climbing and descending, well I could climb and descend no problem at all, the problem was levelling out at the correct altitude on the climb. It took me a while to get the hang on lowereing the nose that much, I think it's because the nose is raised so much for the climb, I'm not sure, but eventually I was told I had the hang of it, felt to me like pure dumb luck in all honesty, and was asked if I'd like to try turning in climb and descent coming out at correct heading and altitude. I managed to get this down to +/- 50ft and +/- 5 degrees which I was quite proud of. But still getting this whole feeling of sensory overload, properly using the instruments, controlling the aircraft, keeping a lookout all at once.
So we're coming in to land which I managed to do on voice prompts alone. I don't know how as reading on here lots of people seem to have a problem with it, but the way my instructor has explained it to me, it just seems kind of natural, a kind of swooping motion in my mind.
I taxiied back to where the aircraft is kept and over the grass to spin it round for the first time on my own, after being shown a quick way to scatter the birds
So overall I found this lesson quite difficult. In all honesty I think I may need to recap for a bit next lesson, but my instructor says I've said that to him every lesson and been fine. We shall see...