Lesson 4

Climbing and descending

I was able to perform the full preflight inspection today, which I had been looking forward to learning. It involves walking around the aircraft checking various parts and confirming that it is airworthy. Checking the fuel situation was an important highlight, looking in the tanks to confirm fuel levels and draining a sample from each tank to check for water and sediment. My instructor told me that these procedures have their roots in times when aircraft would often be fueled from barrels and sediment and water contamination was more common, although obviously it sill pays to check, especially at the first flight of the day and after refueling. I also got avgas on my hand for the first time, checking the Skipper's funny little valve under the fuel sump. Silly valve design that one.

I had the chance to taxi a little bit more, and got used to the brakes pretty quickly while lining up behind a Warrior at the holding point! Didn't much feel like driving the prop through his/her tail.

After takeoff the air was a little bit bumpy, but I managed to hold pretty good straight and level, with my instructor giving me a little more liberty on the controls after last week. After a quick demonstration I practiced climbs, including lowering the nose every 500ft to check for traffic ('you can do it all your life and never see anyone in front, but the one time you don't check someone will be there' - instructor). After a few climbs and level-offs, we did powered descents and glide descents, leveling-off after each.

As I think I've mentioned before, you can read about it all you want, but in practice it's much trickier. Co-ordination between attitude, throttle and trim is difficult so far, and something I'm looking forward to getting used to. For example, when initiating a climb I check the sky for traffic, increase throttle to full, correct flightpath with rudder, adjust attitude to put the horizon where it should be, let the airspeed settle to (around) 68, and trim. On paper it is so simple, but getting it to happen physically takes getting used to. I feel much more practice will be needed before I have the hang of these simple maneuvers, but I look forward to being able to execute them natrually.

Main lesson from today: STOP LOOKING AT THE INSTRUMENTS! I need to use the horizon and outside view as primary reference, and only glance at the instruments as indicators of trends, and re-adjust accordingly.