Steve’s Flying Blog

After the first couple of weeks, and mastering the different stalls, we moved on to steep turns and turns around a point. These maneuvers are designed to mimic the turns you would be making in the pattern maneuvering to land. Steep turns are a 360 degree turn at a 45 degree angle. You have to roll into the turn and out at the same heading, plus or minus 5 degrees. You must maintain altitude within 100 feet and the bank angle within 5 degrees. First off, turning an airplane at forty-five degrees is, at first, a little scary. My first steep turn was pretty funny. I got my altitude and air speed all set and rolled into the turn and had some trouble maintaining altitude but got around to where I started and rolled back out of the turn, feeling pretty good. Rick looks over at me and says “Let me know when you’re ready to start the turn”. He said I was barely at a standard rate turn which is twenty degrees so I had to do it all over again and this time he set the plane at forty five degrees and I about shit a pickle. Needless to say, it took a few times until I was comfortable and competent doing steep turns. This is a good maneuver to help your coordination when making turns and see how turning affects air speed and attitude. Most airplane accidents happen when you are low and slow, so this is very good practice.
Turns around a point are designed to simulate flying the pattern and the effect the wind has on the plane. When the wind isn’t blowing, it’s nothing more than flying a rectangle but throw in a little wind, and it gets a lot more difficult. You have to adjust the timing of your turn and the rate of turn to stay as close to a rectangle as possible. Believe me when I tell you when we first started turns around a point, it wasn’t pretty. It looked more like a trapezoid, to be honest. One of the other things we practiced quite a bit was emergency procedures. One day, we were flying along, and Rick reaches over and pulls the power all the way back to idle. I said to him “Are you nuts?” and he laughed and said, “What are you going to do now? You just lost your engine. My mind was racing so fast I didn’t do anything, I just sat there. We had talked some about what you do in this case but he caught me by surprise and for the life of me I couldn’t remember what to do first. Well he put the power back in and then we went over the proper procedures to follow if in the event you lose your engine. Basically, you need to establish your best glide speed and trim the plane for that speed. In 64551, another Cessna 172 that pretty much turned out to be my steady plane, it’s around 80 knots. Then you need to select a place to land and the best way is to make a turn in either direction to see if the best place is behind you and then after you select where you’re going to land you need to head directly for that spot. Then, if time permits, you can try changing tanks and attempt a restart in the event you ran a tank dry, but depending on altitude, you don’t have a lot of time to worry about restarting the engine At that point, you can tune the radio to 121.5 and declare an emergency. If you’re lucky enough to be near an airport declaring an emergency, pretty much, clears any other traffic out of your way, and you have priority to land on any runway available. As you approach your landing spot, you need to gauge your altitude and bleed off any excess altitude and air speed and prepare to land. Whether it’s in the top of the trees, a field or in the water you need to land under control. The vast majority of off airport landing are survivable as long as you land under control. This is where all the training really comes in to play. You don’t want to stall and spin yourself into the ground trying to land without an engine. So the next time Rick reached over and pulled the power, I was ready and did all the things needed for a successful off airport landing. You don’t actually declare an emergency, but you do change the channel, and you actually fly the plane down pretty close and then just go full power and go about your training. It was quite scary the first time, but it was fun, and we were getting closer to doing take offs and landings or touch and goes depending on where we were landing. This is when the real fun starts.

After we returned from vacation I spent the next few weeks visiting a few other flying schools to make sure I was picking the best available program to learn how to fly. I ended up going back to Caldwell and hooking up with Rick Perez, the instructor that I met my first time I visited the airport. We discussed what the training would entail and he explained the process I needed to follow to get my third class medical certificate and student pilot certificate. You don’t need the certificate to start training but you do need it before you solo so you have some time. So on May 8th I took my first hour lesson in N54752, a Cessna 172. The first few hours are pretty much basic fundamentals of flight and give you a chance to get comfortable with the whole idea of flying an airplane. Everything was going well until Rick mentioned we would be doing stalls on our next lesson. I had no idea what to expect so I was quite nervous and for a time thought about just calling it quits. Obviously I still wasn’t all on the same page inside, still battling the fear. What I really liked about Rick as an instructor was he spent a few minutes going over what we were going to do each lesson before we went up and that gave me a good idea what to expect. When we were going to be doing stalls he explained what a stall was. I thought he was going to stop the engine and then show me the procedure to get it restarted but it has nothing to do with the engine running or not running. A stall is nothing more than an inadequate amount of air flowing over the wings to sustain flight (I won’t get into the angle of attack part of stalls, it’s a bit too complicated for this purpose). When that happens the plane literally drops from the sky. The reason you practice stalls is to get to know what it feels like when the plane you are flying is about to stall. The most critical times that a stall can happen and cause major problems is when you are low and slow, as you will be when you take off and when you land. The way you practice stalls is to climb to around 3500 feet so you have plenty of room to recover and then simulate take off stalls and landing stalls. The take off stall is performed by going to full power and raising the nose as if you were taking off. You keep raising the nose until the speed slows and the amount of air flowing over the wings is not enough to sustain flight. Just before the plane stalls you will feel some buffeting of the airframe and that is a sure sign you are about to stall. When the plane actually stalls the nose drops and if you are not in coordinated flight (the ball centered on the turn coordinator) you will go in to a spin which will surely kill you when you are low and slow because there is not enough altitude to recover. The procedure to recover from a stall is to pull the power back to idle and lower the nose to increase the amount of air flowing over the wings (decreasing the angle of attack) and then slowly start to recover altitude. If you happened to enter a spin when you stalled after pulling the power back you would apply opposite rudder to the direction of the spin and then once you are no longer spinning slowly raise the nose to regain altitude. After Rick doing a couple of stalls I got my chance to try one. After the first few I actually got to like doing stalls, it sure is a good way to improve your slow speed handling of your airplane. The landing or power off stall is performed just the opposite from the power on stall. You slow the plane to landing speed and then raise the nose as if you were flairing the plane for landing. The more you raise the nose the slower you go and the less the air flows over the wings (high angle of attack) causing the plane to stall. The recovery is similar, you lower the nose and in this case you add power and slowly regain altitude.  From this point forward we did stalls just about every lesson to really get the feel of the plane when it is about to stall. Next up is steep turns, another maneuver that gives you a good feel of what happens when you make turns.