Once again I've been staring at the skies, watching the planes going by. It was time for another lesson so I booked a double at the weekend. The weather was very mixed - sunny with heavy rain showers which made for a very interesting flight.
In G-BPTE we took off on runway 25 as usual, but this time with two stages of flaps so we positively leapt into the sky at 55 kts and headed west. Once in the air the scale of the weather was pretty evident. Ahead of us was a black cloud pouring grey shadowy rain onto the landscape below. Tony said to aim towards it's left hand side. I really wish I'd taken a few photos, it was stunning.
We flew around it's left hand side revealing it was a line of rain clouds snaking off in an arc to the south. There was a thin section ahead to our right and Tony pointed me through it. A brief splash of rain on the windscreen and we burst out the other side and into the sun. Awesome!
We ran through some revision of various lessons - stalls, slow flight, medium and steep turns. I think my favourite feeling is when I'm in a turn, looking out of the cabin window at the ground. Even so my steep turns just weren't steep enough as I kept slipping away from the required 60° turns. Slow flight went very well over sunny Berkshire and stalls were pretty smooth. Tony also use some blanking devices over the instruments to force me to maintain altitude or heading based on stuff outside the cockpit rather than instruments. That went surprisingly well proving I stare at the dials far too much. My difficulty came returning to Blackbushe. Joining on the dead side and trying to hit the circuit height and speed just seemed beyond me. In our debrief Tony and I decided it was sheer burn out - concentrating hard for an hour and then trying the difficulty of joining and landing. One thought is that I should have a quick snack before flying or rest in the middle of a lesson to keep my concentration levels up.
No comments:
Post a Comment