Lesson Three: slow flight and patterns

Last night Joel and I went up for lesson three. He suggested we combine some pattern work with basic emergency procedures and slow flight.

I'm doing the pre-flight inspections all by myself now, and getting pretty methodical about it. That is, I can go in a nice flow around the airplane without having to move from side to side because I forgot something. Just little things that come with experience--even the little bit I've had.

I'm also handling all the radio work now, and is definitely my strong-suit. The hours on vatsim have paid off (though I am now a firm believer that other than practicing radio phraseology with vatsim, a flight simulator is pretty much worthless for private pilot training.)

It was getting towards dusk when we started. We flew in early evening twilight down south of Olympia, to the area Glacier uses for practice maneuvers. Climbed to 2500, and Joel says, "You're about to have an engine failure, though you don't know it." As I'm absorbing what that means, and understanding that we're in a make-believe scenario, Joel cuts the throttle. I pitch up to get as much altitude out of our momentum as I can, and then establish a glide speed of around 65 knots. We start looking for a non-airport place for an emergency landing. There's a speedway near there, which would be excellent. I set up to land down the wide part of the oval, and didn't do too bad.

We climbed back up to 2000 or so, and reduced airspeed (maybe 70 knots), and then Joel had me gradually pitch up to reduce to the stall speed (which is 47 knots in our aircraft, assuming no flaps). As we got down to around 55 or so--mind you the aircraft is in a pretty steep pitch-up attitude at this point--the little horn starts going off, a little slower and the aircraft starts to shake a bit, and we really lose lift. We stopped short of a full stall, since you're not supposed to do intentional stalls in a 172. But I definitely got the gist of what it feels like and how it happens. We did it again for good measure, then I practiced VOR navigation to get us back to Olympia.

We did three circuits of the pattern, and I'm getting the hang of it, though it's surprising how many different things there are to remember within a span of about 5 minutes. It's one of those things that you just need to do enough for it to become natural.

Ground school followed, and pointed out to me how much more I need to be studying at home. So after facilitating Michael's (son, 7) bedtime routine, I hit the books until around 11.