Pilot Life: Third Flight's the Charm!

I felt really good about today's flight. In fact, I flew in the same airplane today as the one I flew on Saturday (and it hasn't flown since that flight!). I'm not making this up; I actually had to remove some cobwebs off the airplane during pre-flight! Is this also a good time tell you that I HATE spiders??? Anyways, I really enjoyed this flight because I did well on quite a few things today. After conducting the pre-flight inspection and got started up, we taxied to the runway and my instructor had me get our takeoff clearance from the Provo air traffic control tower; I got to make my first radio call from an airplane! My takeoff was a little better too; last time, I was weaving all over the runway but this time I managed to keep the plane mostly on the center line.

After takeoff, we flew southeast to a different practice area from last time. Once we were situated, my instructor handed me a pair of foggles, which are glasses that have been made to simulate foggy conditions to the wearer. Foggles are frosted on the top half to limit the field of vision of pilots and force them to use only the flight instruments; they help to simulate the conditions of low cloud ceilings, heavy fog, night, and other Instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). I'll most likely use these a lot more when I'm training to earn my Instrument rating in order to be able to fly IFR (Instrument Flight Rules). The purpose of wearing the foggles for these VFR (Visual Flight Rules) flights is to force me to depend on and look at my instruments during the maneuvers my instructor asked me to perform, which included climbing and descending turns. And I did pretty well doing these maneuvers while wearing the foggles! I have to admit, when I could only see my instruments and not be able to look out the canopy, I realized the value of my flight instruments. By taking away my ability to see outside the airplane, the flight instruments were the only sources to tell me how I was doing and how the airplane was flying; I came to rely upon them a lot more, which explains how I did well on today's maneuvers compared to last time.

I didn't have to wear the foggles long, however as the rest of the flight was more visual. After removing the glasses, my instructor demonstrated slow flight to me. Slow flight is a requirement that a pilot must master in order demonstrate capabilities in operation. Slow flight is essentially a portion of an airplane's performance envelope above the speed at which the plane will stall, but below the aircraft's endurance speed. A more accurate description of slow flight is Minimum Controllable Airspeed (MCA), and the name doesn't get any more self-described than that. Pilots have to learn how the controls in an airplane feel and how it performs at slow airspeeds. Controls get rather "mushy" in slow flight and not a lot of input is required to make turns in slow flight. I did alright attempting slow flight. After that, the fun really began by practicing some stall recovery! My instructor first demonstrated and then had me do a couple of power-on and power-off stalls. Power-on stalls can occur when a plane taking off (because you're usually applying full power on the engine to accelerate!) and power-off stalls can happen during landing (you take out engine power during landing!). As such, pilots need to know how to demonstrate recovering from stalls during these sequences of flight just in case it happens to them so they'll know what to do when one happens for real. And I did pretty well doing a couple of stall recoveries after my instructor demonstrated them!

After we were done with the stalls, it was time for us to return to Provo Airport and call it another flight. My instructor had me do most of the landing sequence (we were short on time, so we did a full-stop landing this flight with no touch-and-goes); I did pretty well except for the actual landing! It wasn't my best but I'll improve on that eventually. My instructor is always telling me that initially, I'll be bombarded with a lot of information over the course of my flight instruction but things will start to stick one concept at a time. I'm grateful that he tells me that because that tells me I just need to roll with it not give up. Besides, I've already sunk a lot of money into being here so I don't think giving up is an option! But regardless of where I'm currently at, my logbook got another flight hour recorded!

My logbook! These things are so cool to have and look through!