This was my second lesson of circuits and my brother came along for the ride. There was some really strong cross winds directly at 90° to the runway which made it quite challenging. Bizarrely my first circuit seemed to be my best! I’m looking forward to a lesson of circuits with less cross wind so that I can start to hone my skills in less challenging conditions first.
Continue reading Exercise 12&13 – Circuits
As a pilot you’re most at risk of stalling when you’re coming in to land. This is when you’re flying slowest, unfortunately you’re also very close to the ground so have little time to recover. This lesson was practising stall recovery while in landing configurations and simulating turning from downwind to base and base to finals. My friend Jon came along for the flight too, so there are some photos and video that he took included in the video.
Continue reading Exercise 10.2b – Stall Recovery in Landing Configuration
On the previous lesson we practised slow flight. This was to become familiar with how the aircraft feels while flying on the edge of it’s limits. This lesson we took the aircraft slower than it’s flight envelope to the point where it stalled so that I could experience what this felt like and recognise it before the stall. The next step was to learn how to recover from a stall.
Continue reading Exercise 10.2a – Stalling and Stall Recovery
This lesson was to learn how to perform turns while turning or descending. The turns while climbing are done at 79knts and no more that 20° bank, which is how the climb is done following take off. The descending turns are done at 75knts with two stages of flaps and no more than 30°, which is how they are done when turning on to finals coming in to land.
This lesson was the first time that I’d talked to Farnborough Radar and wasn’t really prepared for it, but it went rather well and it is the type of skill that gets better with practice. Continue reading Exercise 9.2 – Turns While Climbing and Descending and Intro to Slow Flight
This lesson was to learn how to perform medium turns. Medium turns are at 30° while maintaining a constant altitude.
This lesson really clicked for me, I noticed that more of the flying was now becoming second nature. Still lots to learn! I was targeting 65knts on the decent to land very accurately, although I should have been targeting 75knts! Oops. Continue reading Exercise 9.1 – Medium Level Turns
This lesson covered power descents in different configurations, with and without flaps. Continue reading Exercise 8.2 – Descending In Different Configurations
I was browsing YouTube for flying videos and came across a video that had instrument overlays. It was something I’d been considering doing for future videos.
The software is called Dashware and it (more or less) read the GPS trace directly from a file exported by Google MyTracks which I’d used during my flying lesson for Ex 7.1 and 8.1. I had a little trouble with the units for altitude as I was importing them and has to create a custom mapping, but after a little tweaking it worked quite well. Continue reading Dashware Instrument Overlays
There are other general aviation pilots on line who are creating great video and content who provided me inspiration to create this site and also share my experiences.
One such pilot is Jon Hunt. His videos are of very high quality and coherently explained, clearly making best use of his skills as a TV reporter!
This lesson was to learn how to climb and do a glide descent. The climb is full power at 79 Knots and the glide descent is 75 Knots with idle power. Continue reading Exercise 7.1 and 8.1 – Climbing and Descending