Eblo

Being On the Ground Sucks

Second lesson was today. It was a little easier and a little harder. For some reason I was a little nervous before we started - well, and during, my shoulders are fairly tense. But I think that's because I knew my CFI was going to have me doing stuff more on my own this time. I only missed one little thing (oh, two) on the preflight check, so he was impressed. I think I was also more tense because the last/first time, I was just so wow'd, stuff just wasn't sinking in. Although I was more nervous, certain things came easier (rolling out of turns, staying straight and level, etc).

Today we did steep turns and slow flight (two separate things). Steep turn are STEEP (about 45 degrees). They're fun. They remind me of being on the motorcycle. Slow flight is pretty tricky, because controls are very much dampened. But it was still pretty cool. It's basically landing practice at 2500 feet.

Being a fairly warm day, the air was pretty choppy and though that didn't rattle me, it did make maintaining altitude tricky. One minute the plane would want to climb, I'd trim it out to fly level, and then it'd sink. Also, halfway through a 360 degree slow turn, the wind straightened us out. Brice was like, "No, all the way back to East." In my head, I was all, "I'm trying."

We had a good landing today, too. I should have had a little more backpressure on the yoke, but we didn't land short, so that's good. I can't believe that one day I'll be doing that withough someone coaching in my headphones.

I had my GPS with me today, so I have a plot of the whole flight. We covered about 111 miles and just barely crossed into Wisconsin. Even though I thought I did pretty well holding altitude on the banks and slow flight maneuvers, looking at the altitude profiles of the flight tells me otherwise.

Got complimented again today, so that's encouraging. Next lesson is tomorrow. Apparently, we stall.