Today's flight, I felt was much better than yesterday's flight. The way I tell if it was a good day for me was how tired mentally and physically immediately after the flight. If I feel completely whipped then either I worked my butt off or I was way behind the aircraft all day. If I feel good and energized, then I was calm in the plane and doing things right, at least this is what I tell myself. A funny thing though, IP's always have a way of bringing you back down to earth. The flight went very well, but everything else, i.e. radio calls, ground procedures, etc were horrible.
I made a bunch of mistakes before I even left the parking space, I skipped over part of checklist, said the wrong things and pretty much struggled to get off the ground. But once I got in the air, I did really well. I was able to trim (think cruise control for an airplane) a whole lot better than yesterday and my maneuvers I also thought were very good. One way I can tell they were good is because we only did them once instead of 3 or 4 times. Also, we had time for him to demonstrate a spin. Yes, we do intentionally put the aircraft into a spin, in fact I will be able to do it in a couple weeks. The spin was very cool and dangerous, we lost about 2000 ft in altitude in about 5-10 seconds. Not fun if you do it on accident. After the spin we headed over to an airport to do some patterns. I did all of the landings and yes they all sucked. But they are coming along. It gets very busy in the landing pattern, with time I won't even have to think about it.
So, after this I am headed to the simulators for Basic Instruments (BI's). Here I will learn basic scan patterns for instrument flight. It could start tomorrow, I don't know because I am on standby, meaning if there is a slot, I'm in.
Until next time.
Chris
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