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Words of wisdom appreciated

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Words of wisdom appreciated

Old 16th May 2016, 17:02
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Originally Posted by mewsie
What a good idea - I've been searching around for the various components, the rudder pedals are hard to come by! (and pricey, you must have got a bargain!)

Reckon this is worth a try. Did you get the Cessna components, by the way? Or their more generic ones?
Yes, I have the cessna yoke and pedals. Looking back at amazon reciepts - no I did pay more than that - pedals were 114, yoke another 100 ish, + 100 for the TPM + trim was 37. Now the yoke it self was a bit of a let down initially because there was some resistance near the neutral position which was very annoying at start, but it wore off, it's gone now. Another little tool I couldn't go without is the FSUIPC. I need it to calibrate the yoke sensitivity make it work like a real thing. Without calibration it is too sensitive for small GA planes.. Shop around anyway, maybe there's something better than saitek that comes fully ready out of the box. Getting the TPM module to work was an incredible pain too, but once you get it running.. well worth it
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Old 16th May 2016, 18:15
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I have not read the whole thread - but a tactic my father used 75 years ago (and which I've borrowed) is to put circuits and landings to the side for a while, instead go out to the practice area and do some slow flight practice. Gentle handling skills down in the 1.1 to 1.3 Vso range; No rush, make speed changes slowly. Linger at 1.3 Vso for a good 5 minutes at a time, gentle turns, get really comfortable in this regime.

Then come back into the circuit and see if you can apply these skills in the approach & landing phase. All the advice in earlier posts is still good, but now you have a broader skill set.
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Old 16th May 2016, 19:37
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You asked for words of wisdom? FFS dont spend your money on sim gear - spend it on flying lessons!
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Old 16th May 2016, 20:31
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Money for sim and equipment ??? ??? ???
Do you have an inflatable girlfriend also?

Simple comment - don't do that!
Next you go pay2fly and eat children.

Ok, finally left "words'o'wisdom" ...

Last edited by Fly4Business; 17th May 2016 at 11:39.
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Old 16th May 2016, 20:55
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Heston, Fly4Business, do you care to elaborate on your comments? I was only sharing my own experience in regard to what helped me. If you're thinking my experience is somehow invalid, the very least you could do is to explain why.
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Old 16th May 2016, 20:59
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Eye line height can make a big difference . May be better if the seat can be raised so your head hits the roof then moved down a little. Also are you learning on grass or tarmac, with the later there are runway edge cues in you peripheral vision, on grass it is harder. Those that learn on tarmac nearly always bounce on the first grass landing with out the cues. Another trick is get your instructor to fly down the runway in ground effect several times, then you do the same a couple of times can help. Another action I don't agree with is closing the throttle coming over the hedge adds extra work load , bad habit to form if flying higher wing loaded machines they will sink dangerously not good. Fly to the flare close once you have. Can give your instructor a bit of shock, but you will have more control but don't leave it late. One last thing in any training it is normal to have these flat spots, some time it is best to stop have a short break then when you come back it just works. So have fun take heart it will just click one day and landings feel like they last for ever. Remember if you can drive a car down a motorway at 70 with your right ear a foot from the barrier you can land an aircraft.
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Old 16th May 2016, 21:06
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@mewsie I see you are learning at Glos it would be interesting to know who with as I'm based there!
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Old 16th May 2016, 23:51
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I wouldn't put it quite as brutally as Fly4Business did, but I've never found PC type sims to be of the slightest help for anything. Actually I've never successfully landed an aircraft with one. It's a totally different skill from flying the real thing. Different story if you can use a proper sim with wrap around screens and simulated motion.

One thing I meant to say earlier is, don't do touch and goes. I don't like doing them now, with 1700 hours under my belt. They put way too much stress into the situation, since you've barely landed and now you have to reconfigure the aircraft and switch mental gears to do something quite different. If you have enough runway, do stop and goes. If not, stop and taxi back. Yes, it'll add a bit to your cost, but as you said you're not really getting value for your money at the moment anyway.
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Old 17th May 2016, 10:13
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@fly4business - haha! No inflatable girlfriends, regular boring standard female here, although do occasionally eat small children: decent source of protein. The way I'm thinking is, money-wise, if sims and kit save me even 2 lessons, they've paid for themselves. Instructor has been nagging me to fly circuits in my head in evenings - is flying a sim one step more useful than that do you think? The steps of the circuit are not really the problem for me. I know what I am supposed to do at each stage, but my problem is with feeling the aircraft, flying the circuit in my head just seems like listing things, without the feel.

@horizon flyer - funnily enough this was a bit of a challenge we had a month or so ago. I had the seat positioned high as I have proportionately short legs and long torso and there was a parallax issue with the ASI. Instructor was yelping at me to watch my speed, which I was seeing as (for example) 65kts, yet from her position was below 60. So we dropped my seat back down and mucked about with cushions for a while but it's still something that comes up! I'm learning on tarmac. I hope with all this advice that I can relax and start having fun with it again...

@barit1 - good idea, and means taking it out of the pressure of the busy circuit too.

@n5296s - a good point actually, especially if the landing hasn't been quite centre, it doesn't take much during takeoff to end up in a less-than-desirable position, and a stressful landing followed immediately by a stressful takeoff just compounds the situation. The airfield is very busy and has tightened up on the rules around booking circuits, so I am not sure how easy it will be to fit this in, but I will suggest it.
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Old 17th May 2016, 11:33
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Originally Posted by n5296s
I've never found PC type sims to be of the slightest help for anything.
I'm one of those who likes RANT for the procedural and SA aspects of instrument flying.
Originally Posted by n5296s
One thing I meant to say earlier is, don't do touch and goes. I don't like doing them now, with 1700 hours under my belt. They put way too much stress into the situation, since you've barely landed and now you have to reconfigure the aircraft and switch mental gears to do something quite different.
I was doing touch-and-goes on water last week - a new one on me, didn't know you could do that. It takes three hands working different controls at the same time, so the instructor did the flaps.


(Neither of which is likely to be of much immediate interest to the OP.)
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Old 17th May 2016, 11:55
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I do not say sims are useless for everything, they just don't help building flying skills. A sim does provide a nice, easy and cheap way to get acquainted with how to operate flight accompanying electronic equipment and procedures, some of which even whole planes are flown off (my daily workplace as well), and train for operators skills. It is a very welcome affordable aid to learn i.e. IFR handling of electronics on reduced risk on the ground, which is often only little more then being a pax with buttons in front, but not more - myexperience.
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Old 17th May 2016, 14:57
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Based on a few years of leisure experience with both PC sim and actual flying, my conclusion is that PC sim flying is potentially useful for the "headwork" part (procedures, checklist discipline, understanding principles of flight, even R/T if flying online, and navigation if you have a decent scenery pack). For the "airwork" part, its value is very limited IMHO. It is fun, immersive, and delightfully cheap, weather-independent and hassle-free (as soon as you got a running system, not immediately obvious with MSFS), but in my experience there is no appreciable aircraft handling skill transfer to real-life flying.
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Old 18th May 2016, 13:14
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Concentration!

I had my hour with an instructor to sign my SEP rating off last year after some time away from flying and even though I've been flying on and off for 14 years I found myself doing exactly what you said.

Not getting the flare right, ballooning and even having the instructor grab the controls when I flared a little too much...

These things come with practice, and in a situation where you're going through your PPL where it's all new you'll find yourself trying really hard to remember everything at once, which ultimately makes you tired and frustrated really quickly.

Upon looking back on my experience, this fatigue made my concentration dwindle quite quickly and therefore because I was making sure I'd done by downwind checks, kept the right speed, put on the carb, right flap setting etc. I was finding that my lapse of concentration lead to me not actually concentrating on actually making the aircraft fly where I wanted it to. I'd find myself on finals either too high, too low, too fast etc.

This point has been mentioned before but when turning final make a mental note that you have to take control of the aircraft. Say to yourself "It's here that I normally screw up, so while I have the space firmly but safely fly the aircraft to where you want it to be".

The rest is down to flying the right speed. I don't know what type you're flying but say your approach speed is 65kts... if you've flown the aircraft in to the correct approach position, when your speed settles it will float right down to the numbers and you won't balloon because the physics that some brainy engineer figured out will mean the aircraft will gentle sit on the runway.

Then there's the cross wind landing!

Don't worry, you'll get it.
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Old 18th May 2016, 16:08
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I found that using a simulator (a home PC with FSX and also XPlane) actually reversed some progress I had made.

The reason is that I was learning to fly the 'sim' aircraft and the simulators are not very good at the physics of the ground effect, the changes in control authority and the 'sense' you get from peripheral vision related to the flare.

In fact I have made a decision to avoid the simulator except maybe for some messing about with 'Nav' (which is a bit silly on the simulators as they tend to have the one obvious landmark standing out massively and then loads of generic trees and buildings everywhere else.
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Old 20th May 2016, 05:09
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>but I've never found PC type sims to be of the slightest help for anything. >Actually I've never successfully landed an aircraft with one. It's a totally >different skill from flying the real thing.

Totally different? Did you have to push the yoke to climb ? Turn the yoke left to go right ?

I disagree with all the negative comments re "no flight skills transferred / achieved" with sims.

The sight picture when landing is the same in a sim as the real plane.

When I was having difficulty with my landings, the chief instructor told me to stand up and look down at the table we were sitting at.

Then he said to slowly squat down while observing the "shape" / sight picture of the table, and notice how it "flattens out.".

That's exactly what you are looking for when landing.

@mewsie, what are you thinking about when you start the flare ?

A good thought is that you are just going to fly the plane along the runway as long as possible (power off or minimal) while feeling and adjusting for the sink rate.

As for your ballooning, you should be just trying to level the plane from it's descending attitude, then as you close the throttle, matching the sink rate by increasing the yoke pressure. You don't want to climb, just descend as slowly as possible.
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Old 20th May 2016, 07:38
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It's worth remembering that training at Gloucester is hard, what with 6 different runways to get used to, different noise abatements on each, a complex airport layout, full ATC, very busy traffic, occasional long hold times, frequent requests to orbit/extend downwind/report before downwind/turn early to stay ahead of instrument traffic, and a lot of other pilots in the circuit who don't know the procedures as well as they should. You don't have to worry about all of this when you first go out as the tower will know you're a solo student, but it does mean there's a lot more to take in during training. Also, these old pprune threads with people bragging about solo-ing in 4 hours really don't help - I'm sure the people who take longer are in the majority but they don't tend to post to these threads!

I do think BackPacker's advice is brilliant - ask to go out and do something else for a bit and remind yourself why you're doing this whole flying thing. I did beat myself up a lot during the circuits stage but I wonder if I might have done better if I'd managed to relax some more. I think I may have trained at the same place as you and I flew with a few different instructors prior to going solo - they're all fantastic there and they all helped in slightly different ways. Circuits was hard for me but once you go solo the course really starts getting exciting, and having trained at Gloucester landing anywhere else will be a breeze!
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Old 20th May 2016, 21:25
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it is still mandatory in EASA land to do several take offs and landings in a real aeroplane before the type rating is issued.
Is that old-fashioned "base-training" in an empty aircraft or takeoffs and landings during line-flying with a training captain?
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Old 20th May 2016, 22:53
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Mewsie
As others have said, you are not alone. Like you, I got well and truly stuck in the circuit practice phase. The instructor is following the book that says you must perfect your landing technique, then go solo, then introduce complexities of navigation, and single pilot management of the aircraft.
My issue was that I could only fly every other week, and winter weather often got in the way of that. I got rusty. It took a concerted effort to increase the frequency of flying sessions. Eventually we got there.

I think that I detect your challenge is during the flare phase? Are you flying low wing aircraft? They balloon worse than high wing, but once you crack the technique you can land anything. Slow speed handling is different to high speed, coarser, you have to adapt. Airspeed management is critical. If you approach at 75 when it's supposed to be 70 you need to lose that speed before you can ask the plane's permission to consider re-acquainting itself with Mother Earth.

In simple terms you fly at approach speed, descending towards the threshold. Level off a few feet above the ground, close the power and watch out the window. DON'T YANK THE STICK BACK. You've got to watch your attitude. As the speed decays (and it will), you try and keep it flying level, against all the odds, until she can't stay in the air any more. That's called a landing. You know it. I know it.

Meanwhile, if it's any consolation, I'll admit to not being proud of my capabilities. My second landing is usually my best, ie the one after the bounce. But today I feel good. A perfect 3-pointer.
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Old 22nd May 2016, 20:23
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Airspeed management is critical. If you approach at 75 when it's supposed to be 70 you need to lose that speed before you can ask the plane's permission to consider re-acquainting itself with Mother Earth.
Plus, at higher speeds your elevator is more effective. So less elevator input needed for the same pitch up moment. In other words: A pitch input which would be perfect at a proper Vref, will lead to a balloon at Vref+5.

Nail the speed at the POH recommended speed (and don't blindly add 5 knots for the instructor and another 5 for the wife and kids) and you are halfway to a good landing.
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Old 22nd May 2016, 21:08
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When experienced pilots do a type rating in a simulator, and I'm talking a full motion, multi million dollar simulator here, it is still mandatory in EASA land to do several take offs and landings in a real aeroplane before the type rating is issued. This is because these multi million dollar simulators are not considered an adequate model of a real landing. It's different.
Not so - we now have zero flight time training, the type rating is issued never having flown the real aircraft, the first time it is flown these days is with a training Captain in the other seat and paying passengers in the back!
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