My Flight Journal

Sunday, January 25, 2004 4:19pm

I broke 30hrs today with a 2.8 flight. My instructor told me that today we'd practice all the maneuvers in the PTS and maybe do a diversion. I thought that sounded good and expected a relatively easy flight today. But noooooo. As soon as we climb into the airplane he tells me, "Ok, today I'm gonna pretend to be your examiner and you're on your checkride. I'm just gonna sit here and not say anything other than telling you what maneuvers I want to see." Oh well, so much for an easy day.

We launched out using a soft-field technique - which I did ok on. We flew to the north to an area bounded by a MOA to the west, Class C to the north and east, and Class B to the south. It was a plenty big enough area to work in, with good landmarks to mark the boundaries of the box we needed to stay in. Up to 2,500 ft and I went thru steep turns (lots of those), slow flight clean and dirty, departure and arrival stalls, both immanent and full. I was flying the R model today and that thing can get real damn squirrelly with power-on stalls. I handled it really nicely though. In all, I was pretty proud of everything except the first few steep turns, though I did get those figured out after a few tries. Oh yea, and during one of the stall practices he yanked the motor and I had to go thru the engine out procedures and set us up for an off-field landing. Think I did pretty well with that too.

Then he told me to fly to Orlando Country (X04) and tell him when we'd be arriving there. I somehow managed to figure that out, threading between the Class B and the MOA, and arrived 1 and 1/2 minutes sooner than I said we would. Not too shabby. If you've never landed at X04 and you're feeling like you really need a good scare, you should go there. The runway is published as 100ft wide and I can tell you right now that's a load of crap. It might be 50ft wide. Maybe. It's a little wider than the wingspan of a 172. It's like landing on a sidewalk. And it's not even close to flat. It looks like someone just paved a stretch of cow pasture. Plus there are tall trees that run half way down the length of the runway, with a big-ass lake (Apopka) on the other side. So you get some really nasty winds and rotors coming off those trees. Somehow by the grace of God I managed to survive two touch and go's there and flew over to some nearby fields to do ground ref practice.

I nailed all the ground ref stuff. I seem to have a knack for that. From there we flew back to Sanford and practiced some short and soft field landings. I still need a lot of work on that. My patterns sucked too, so that didn't help. After we put the plane away my instructor told me during the debrief that if I'd gotten a really nice examiner who was having a good day, he might have passed me. Personally I would have been surprised. I really need to work on landings - hopefully Wednesday night this week. And then he told me to start planning my long solo cross-country, cause I might be doing that next weekend. Yikes!