Well It’s been a few weeks now since I started on the this long but exciting journey to become a pilot. I have had nine lessons and a total of seven hours flying the Cessna 152 as a student pilot, all of the work so far has been to prepare me for completing circuits and my first solo flight. Over the past nine lessons I have progressed through the early stages of the training modules from effects of control to stalling and recovering the aircraft.
Put simply effects of control is looking at what happens when you move the controls and how to use them in co-ordination with each other. This has been very enjoyable but also a huge leap in my skills base, it may sound straight forward but when ever you move one control surface this will have an effect on the others and so to achieve straight and level flight or a steady turn you have to balance each of the controls and trim the the aircraft. Once this has become something which you are comfortable with and you are able to fly the aircraft around reaming on heading and in the correct attitude and heading you can move onto stalling.
A stall is when the angle of attack (the angle at which the wing meets the airflow) is so steep that the air flowing over the wing becomes so turbulent that you no longer have a negative pressure above the wing and it stops flying. This is something best avoided but in order to recognise when you are in or approaching a stall and how to get out of it you have to induce a stall to experience it. This means you deliberately cause the plane to stop flying, something that may sound very scary but although it’s not a situation to be taken lightly as long as you have a good instructor and know what you are doing is not as bad as it sounds.
I have found the co-ordination needed to recover quickly something hard to master and have had a few instance where my instructor has looked a little worried when I glance right, never good! Performing a more risky and slightly dramatic manoeuvre is always a good way to keep your instructor awake, but we have had a few practices and I certainly feel like I’m getting there.
The main reason this is so important is you are most likely to experience this when you come into land as this is when you have the plane moving slowly and are making tight turns, the perfect condition for a stall. As you will be close to the ground you wont have much time to deal with it and recover from the situation without crashing. With that in mind I had my first experience of helping to control the landing, quite an event and something I will probably remember for the rest of my life.
We had been out flying around the local area practising the stall and homing my skills controlling the aircraft in normal flight when it was time to return to the airfield. As per normal my instructor asked me to fly the aircraft in to join the circuit (the approach pattern used around an airfield, usually at 1000ft and in a rectangular patter to one side of the airfield). Once we had joined the first part of the circuit my instructor normally took control but he simply asked me to change height and heading to continue around the circuit towards the landing end of the runway. Starting to wonder what was going on I carried out my instructions thinking surly he’ll take control in a minute, wont he?
Then we made a turn onto the base leg (bottom end of the rectangle across the approach end of the airfield) and descended to 500ft. I kept thinking surely now he’ll grab the controls and take us onto final but he than asked me to make the final left hand turn to line up with the runway and continue descending. At this point I realised I was to have a larger roll than normal in landing the plane. Thankfully he wasn’t going to ask me to do it all myself but he controlled the throttle and I’m pretty sure I felt him move the rudder and I controlled the ailerons.
His instructions were perfect, he explained that I just needed to pick the point where the numbers were at the end of the runway and keep the nose pointed there. With that being my only task it’s fair to say my instructor did most of the work and it couldn’t be classed as a landing I performed but it was definitely enough for my first time. When we were nearly at the run way I was instructed to raise the nose quickly and fly along the run so I pulled back on the controls, raised the nose and we sank out of the and touched straight down on the runway. Once the plane had slowed to a halt I took a sigh of relief we had made it without incident but turned to my instructor and apologised for not flying across the runway as instructed. At that point he smiled and said I knew you wouldn’t, no one does at this stage it was just to get you to pull the nose up so we didn’t crash nose first into the runway, you did fine.