Pilot Life: Slow Flight, Stalls, and Landing Practice.

Things are starting to come together. I'm getting close to being ready for that long-awaited (not to mention overdue) checkride. My instructor and I went up for a short flight. The only things we did today was polishing up on slow flight/slow cruise, stalls, and landings.

Another round with good ole N802CT!

After pre-flight, we fueled up the aircraft and got started up. We taxied, did our run-ups and got airborne before flying south to practice maneuvers. After we got some distance between us and the Spanish Fork Airport, my instructor had me configure the airplane into slow cruise with full flaps extended. From there it was a matter of maintaining altitude, gently banking to the headings my instructor called out, applying power where necessary while cruising at a speed just shy of the stall warning going off. Satisfied, we then did some stalls, both power-on and power-off. After some initial set-ups, I got them done almost flawlessly; I just needed to remember to stay coordinated by maintaining my current heading, which meant making small adjustments with the stick and rudders.

Satisfied with stalls, we headed back to the airport. My instructor also threw a curve ball at me by pulling the throttle back to simulate an engine failure en route. We were still plenty high enough so that gave me a chance to go through the emergency checklist to simulate a in-flight restart. Obviously, we assumed that failed so it was time for a simulated emergency landing, by doing an engine-out landing on the runway! In the end, we made it to the runway by maintaining the airplane's best glide speed and putting in flaps when landing was assured. After touching down, I advanced the throttles and got back in the air and flew the traffic pattern. After doing the simulated engine out landing, my instructor had me do a soft-field landing followed by one last circuit in the pattern to set up for a short-field landing. I pretty much nailed the soft-field landing, but I definitely needed to polish up the short-field landing, so I'll get some more practice on that next week. After the final landing, we called it a successful training flight and returned to the ramp and parked the plane. And I've got the satisfaction of flying five days in a row this week!