Once we were in the practice area, my instructor had me go through the maneuvers he taught me to do on previous flights. He had me start out with slow-flight followed by some power-on and power-off stalls. After going through those maneuvers, my instructor pulled back the engine throttle down to idle and simulated an engine failure. Once again, it was a matter of following procedure. First, establish the airplane's ideal glide speed Here's some useless trivia: The Diamond DA-20 Katana is a light aircraft that was developed from the Diamond HK36 Super Dimona, a motor glider And I just realized I photographed one (pictured below) a year ago! So while simulating this engine failure, I was basically flying an aircraft descended from a powered glider that is NOT a glider! How ironic...
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| A Diamond HK36 Super Dimona I photographed back in Salem over a year ago. I'd consider the Super Dimona a predecessor to the Katana that I'm currently training in. |
After establishing the best glide speed, I had to pick a field to practice my approach in (if this were a real engine-failure situation, I'd have plenty of fields to choose from and land in if needed! Hopefully, I'll never have to resort to that...). Once that was taken care of, the next step was to go through the emergency engine restart checklist. For the sake of the simulation, it was assumed that restart didn't work so the end result was to practice approaching the field that I would've landed in. My instructor gave me great advice before regarding an emergency approach into a field for an engine-out landing and that was to treat it as if it were a regular pattern approach to help with remember the procedures. Once a safe "landing" in the field was guaranteed, I throttled the engines forward to full power and did a "go-around," which in aviation terms is aborting the current landing approach and try again if it were a normal airport, but in this case, the go-around meant to get back up to altitude. It was time for us to head back to the airport.
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| View of Utah Lake looking to the north en route back into Provo. |
Approach into to Provo was routine and opted for a full-stop landing. The tower directed us towards the main runway but much to my surprise, my instructor called out on the radio and requested a "straight-in" from our current position on the shorter crosswind runway if it was available, something I didn't expect out of him; because there wasn't any other traffic in the pattern, we were cleared to land on the crosswind runway. From where we were at, it was just a long final approach.
Now, my landings so far haven't been that great. However, I got quite a bit of practice on the previous flight because it was all pattern work. As I descended and made the approach, I called upon everything I learned from the last flight and even applied some advice that my instructor gave me, which is when I'm just above the runway moments from touching down, look out far towards the end of the runway instead of what's up close right in front of me. This advice helped in the previous flight. In the end, I made one of my best landings to date! My instructor even remarked on it. He asked me where I was looking during the last few moments on landing, verifying that the advice he gave me previously works. After a quick taxi back to the UVU ramp, it was another entry into the logbook and we called it another flight.
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| Diamond DA-20-C1 Katana (N987CT), "Wolf 12," the aircraft my instructor and I took up for today's flight. |
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