Different Perspective

Three lessons this past week.

Sunday brought wet snow and rain to the Olympia area, and with it low ceilings and poor visibility. So that meant ground school with Russell. The session was great--we covered airport operations, focusing on ops at Olympia. My background is fairly strong here, so it was a nice discussion that probed some of the more esoteric rules and regulations.

Wednesday and Thursday involved flight time with Steve, the third Glacier instructor. We focused on maneuvers (slow flight, stalls, and steep turns), which was fun and educational, but more than that I learned that there are as many different perspectives on flight instruction as there are instructors.

There's not enough space in a blog post to get into the technical details of the differences between Steve and Joel, and it would be boring anyway. It's enough to say that there is no one way to learn to fly, and I'm glad to have had a couple of lessons with Steve to learn some different techniques. I'll be back with Joel starting tomorrow, and I plan to talk about which of Steve's recommendations (hopefully, those I liked) could be carried forward through the rest of my training. I particularly liked Steve's final approach technique, which minimizes the number of things you have to remember and do. At this point, simplicity has a lot of benefit!

In any case, I'm pretty comfortable now with stalling the airplane myself and recovering...more so with power off than power on. I also did a passable job on my first steep turn execution (this is a 45 degree bank for 360 degrees in one direction, then same in the other direction, marking a figure eight in the sky.)

What I wasn't terribly comfortable with was Steve's demonstration of some more severe stall situations. In one maneuver we pulled 2.5-3 Gs in what's called an accelerated maneuver stall. I found this pretty disorienting, and it was actually the first time in 7 hours of flight so far that I experienced motion sickness. But it was a good experience that showed me lots of things not to do.

Rain this weekend, which means ground school only.