Practice Makes Perfect!

The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for flying this morning. The sky was mostly clear and the air was smooooooooooth. Wind was calm.

Today was a solo flight to practice some air work (stalls, steep turns, forced and precautionary landings) to bring them inside flight test tolerances. I was having to major issues:

1. With my stalls I keep on getting the stall horn again on recovery. This is bad because it could indicate a potential secondary stall – which is a fail. This would happen with all the different kind of stalls (power-on or with flaps). It never happened before but I started doing it a few weeks ago.

2. Steep turns, I keep on forgetting to add a little power to keep the speed up. Must keep my head out of the cockpit too.

I’m pretty confident now that I have both those problems in check.. I will see with my next lesson.

I was having huge issues with my radio this morning though. I was able to taxi onto the runway when the controller was like “did you want to taxi back to the apron to fix your radio problem?”. I decided it was a good idea to head back to figure out what was going wrong.

There are two radios in the plane. An “original” Cessna radio and a “new” Bendix/King KLX 135A radio. The “new” radio has a digital display and a built in GPS. It was the “new” radio that was misbehaving. It would continue to transmit even after I’ve un-keyed the mic.

The radio has a great feature in that it shows you when you are receiving or transmitting by showing a “R” or “T respectively. If you are transmitting for an extended period of time the words “STUCK MIKE” flash on the screen. This is what was happening even though my push to talk button was not stuck. Switching to COM1 (the “original” radio) worked without any problems.

You can see the radio stack in this photo that a took a while ago. The “original” radio has 127.1 tuned in and the “new” radio has 121.8 tuned in.

On my way out I asked the dispatcher how I did on the mock TC written exam that I wrote on Saturday. She said I got 80%. I just need to get my FI to go over the questions I got wrong and then I can write the real TC exam. Hopefully I can do that sometime this week.