Lesson 7

Doing circles in the sky


After being grounded for the last two weeks due to rough air I was busting to get up in the sky again. I'd been keenly watching the weather forecast all week, which had been saying 'patchy showers clearing in the morning, light winds'. I had my fingers crossed that I might just make it.

The first thing I did when I woke up was look out the window at the broken cumulus clouds. Driving to the airport I was guessing with myself about my chances of getting in the air. I was due to either go through advanced stalls, or revise my turns like I had requested due to not quite feeling proficient enough before I get into the circuit. Due to the safety requirement of recovering from stalls above 3000ft and the airspace ceiling of 4500ft in the training area, I didn't expect stalls to be a possibility because that part of the sky was occupied by all that cloud.

When I arrived at the school my instructor informed me we'd be practising turns, due to the cloud base preventing us stalling. I went out and did the preflight checks, which I can perform efficiently now. I even went through them twice for practise before my instructor arrived. I'm not accidentally skimming over parts of checklist instructions any more ('carb heat check and set cold for takeoff' being the usual culprit), however I remembered on the way home that I haven't been yelling 'clear prop!' out the door like I should be. Although my instructor hasn't pulled me up on it, and I know that there is nobody kneeling down there or anything, I still want to get into the habit.

After comfortably taxiing out we got into the air and I set us up first into a steady climb, then straight and level at 3500ft. It was bumpy from lots of updraughts as indicated by the puffy cumulus clouds, but man did they look beautiful! I always like looking at big clouds from the ground, but up close they're even more spectacular, and you get a sense of how fluid and alive they really are. I pretty quickly had to remind myself I wasn't up there to look at the clouds though.

We went through various types of turns - level, climbing, descending and gliding. Climbing and descending turns were fine, but I really wanted to get comfortable with my level turns. During my first turning lesson I couldnt hold them level, and kept losing heaps of altitude. I think this was a combination of looking at the instruments too much, and needing practise to get the feel of the back pressure required to keep the nose up and compensate for the tilted lift. After a few goes this time I feel much more comfortable, and I'm further etching the view of the horizon into my brain for each manoeuvre.

I'm excited to be getting into the circuit soon, and learning to operate the radio. I still have to get advanced stalls out of the way, which I'm told involves reading the signs of an incipient spin and preventing it from developing, but not actually getting into a spin. There is rain forecast for Sunday, but I really hope I'm not grounded again!