This is an update to a post I made earlier in the week.
The flight on Saturday was good. We finished up stalls and spirals. Let me tell you, spirals are much more easier on the stomach than the spins are. One of my classmates took a video of her spin lesson – I asked for a copy so that I can post it here. Just so you guys can get an idea of what it looks like from inside the aircraft.
The weather wasn’t the best. At 5000′ we were doing our lesson in holes in the ceiling. A little annoying, but its good practice to see what it’s like in less that ideal visibility. I can totally understand how people get disorientated when you cant see the horizon.
I also did some forward slips.. fun.
On the way back it was up to me to navigate. I was able to identify the necessary land marks without great difficulty. Finding my way back was no problem at all. I’m confident that if I was to fly by my self right now, I would have no problems getting up to the north practice area and back.
One thing that I don’t like about my charts is that road names are not printed on them. I think i’m going to mark them in my self in pencil.
It was time for circuits on Monday. A lot of fun! I had two lessons booked. The morning lesson went off without a hitch. From memory I think we did 5 “cycles” (take-offs and landings). 1 was a full stop, the others were touch and gos. What possibly could happen, did happen. We had a runway change, two overshoots (where you abort the landing), and cross-field landing (I think it was called..). All in an hour.
I got my mid-term mark for my Human Factors class on Monday.. 94%. I’m happy with that. A few small stupid mistakes. I don’t feel I did that well on my Meteorology one though. I will find it out on Tuesday.
So I found a video of a spin on YouTube (thanks but no thanks Google Video). So what is happening is that the plane stalls (that beeeep noise you hear is the stall horn), a wing drops (to the left in this video) and you start spinning towards the ground while the plane is stalled. You actually feel a few Gs (1.5-2G) when you pull out of the nose dive.
