Another day dawning with overcast at 800ft and a forecast for it to break imminently. It’s been visibly threatening to break since about 12:00, but we’re now at late afternoon and it stubbornly persists. Anyway, got lessons booked for a week on Wednesday and a week on Thursday, taking advantage of my inter-job holiday. Fingers crossed this time.
So I turned up at PFT for my lesson at 9am today. The Brize report a couple of hours earlier had indicated clear skies, yet at 9am there was a solid bank of stratus at 800ft! We decided to do the briefing and preflight the aircraft, with a view to checking the weather then and deciding whether to go or not. Sure enough, the stratus soon started to break up and was down to 1-2/8 coverage by the time we’d gone through the whole checklist with a thorough walkaround of the PA28-140 Cherokee - but I didn’t have enough time then to fly before my next appointment, so we frustratingly had to abandon flight. Still, the visibility was only 8km in haze, so it would have been a long way from ideal with a presumably non-existent horizon. With all the aircraft booked solidly all weekend, the next slot is a week today, when I have the whole day off. Let’s hope for good weather.
Hours on this day: 1h 0m
Hours so far: 1h 0m
My first hour towards the PPL(A) was a trial lesson in a Cessna 152 at Land’s End airfield in June 2006. For sake of completeness, I’ll include it in this blog. So I rocked up, met the instructor, had a chat and we proceeded with the checklists and start-up. All seemed straightforward, until I tried to taxi and discovered that the sense of the foot-controlled nosewheel steering in a conventional aircraft is opposite to that in a flexwing microlight! Having done about ten hours in flexwings a few months previously, this was most disconcerting for both myself and the instructor, as we veered violently towards the edge of the runway on takeoff…
Having got off the ground, I took control again and everything became easier and somewhat intuitive. We steadily climbed at 80 knots, heading over Penzance towards the middle of the peninsula, then levelled out and started playing with manoeuvres. My main curiousity was about the use of the rudder, since flexwings don’t have one. The instructor demonstrated the “wiggling” yaw effect of small deflections, then at the level cruise, booted full right rudder and held it there. Primary effect: yaw. Secondary effect: roll. Yawing when rolling in the same sense = descent… as we entered a spiral dive at about 45 degrees of bank and 30 degrees of pitch! Great fun. So now is an opportune moment to learn the recovery:
It is simple to recount, yet when it was my turn, I managed to completely forget the order and stuff it up. This was the first useful insight I got into the particular level of mental performance that flying seems to require: I wasn’t concentrating sufficiently when the list of instructions for recovery was given to me. Despite being in an unfamiliar, highly-stimulating and potentially stressful environment, it is necessary to retain a very high level of cognitive performance.
After that, I practiced putting rudder and ailerons together to perform a balanced turn. Having followed the instructor through, I tried it and it failed to go wrong, but even by the end of the lesson I didn’t really feel confident that I’d grasped the knack: the feedback from getting the balance right seemed rather vague. We did a spot of sightseeing, following the northern coast round over St. Ives and back down towards Lands End at about 2000ft - extremely pretty on a clear mid-summers day. Entering the downwind to land, everything started getting fast, and by the time we made short final I’d pretty much lost the plot and was just following the instructor through.
So, one hour in the log book! It was fun, hard work, and the views were very pretty. But taking it further would have to wait ten months for some fortuitous financial circumstances…
I went and got AFE’s PPL Study Pack a couple of weeks ago, which contains the Jeremy Pratt set of textbooks. Enamoured with the novelty of it all, I dove straight in and started studying the Air Law section, since that’s the prerequisite to solo. Four days and about 8 hours of studying later, I did a did a mock paper from the “Question and Answer Simplifier” book - and got 85% (the pass of 75%). This really is not difficult. It’s not trivial: it needs a bit of work and as with many things in flying, a cavalier attitude might lead to surprising disappointment. But it’s not particularly challenging.
Since then, I’ve worked through the sections on Communications, Meteorology, and I’m just about to finish Navigation. It is all very interesting, and Jeremy Pratt’s style is engaging and accessible - but the novelty is wearing off and I need to make more effort now. Perhaps I should do some more of the mock papers to focus my mind.
I’m also considering getting OAT Media’s CD-ROMs on Communications. For most of the theory material, the multimedia learning material seems to be a superfluous waste of money, when the books are so good: but learning RT is essentially learning a foreign language, so having audio would seem to help. I also bought a little airband receiver to listen and get acquainted with this new language - but even with an extended aerial, the reception at home from the various frequencies at Kidlington and Brize is usually unreadable. Maybe I should spend some time at the airport listening-in.
So, my first lesson is booked for early Friday morning at Pilot Flight Training (PFT), based at Kidlington. I’ve also got a week booked in mid-May at “Fly In Spain” flying club, based at Jerez. My hope is that the week in Jerez will get me to first solo and circuit consolidation in a concentrated and efficient way, flying about three hours a day. Once I’ve nailed that, I can concentrate on the rest of the syllabus, especially navigation, at PFT in the typical UK conditions that I’ll spend most of my flying time in.
Also got the medical booked with the local AME, just before I go to Jerez. In retrospect, a slightly risky way round to do it - should have booked the medical before stumping up a €700 deposit for the week in Jerez! Ah well. My eyes are sorted (having just got my prescription updated and splashed £240 on Oakley’s finest) and my general health is good, so fingers crossed.