Flying
Tanya did local flights with me two days in a row! She is really trying hard to come up to speed and is doing great. Friday evening we went out and she practiced a bunch of landings (winds calm). She has a tendency not to use enough rudder when high pitch, high power. So I setup a little exercise. I took off and setup a full power 85 knot climb. I told her I’ll fly the plane, except I was going to let her operate the rudder. She was to just focus on keeping the ball centered. Ok, “I’m going to start relaxing my pressure on the right rudder, you ready?”. As she picked it up, she said “wow”, as she focused on keeping the ball centered. This really does take a whole lot more rudder pressure than she was so used to in the Cessna 150 that she learned to fly in. Cool, good exercise. “Now, do that next time you takeoff.”
Then we went up to 3500′ and practiced flight at approach speeds with flaps. I’m having her use two speeds. 70 knots after abeam the numbers (up to 20 degrees flaps) and 65 knots on short final after the final notch of flaps. This works best for us for now and leaves a lot of fudge room. We have a 5000′ runway to get the details worked out on. I’m very happy with the three position FPS flap position system. There is no guessing how much flaps you have and most of all I like the repeatability of various one touch flap positions.
Since the winds were calm, we spent some quality time in the pattern and Tanya did about four very good landings. She has a bit of a learning curve getting over the fact that this isn’t a tired old C150. Back at the pumps to top off the tanks before putting the bird away as the sun went down. After it was put away, we extracted a couple of cold beers from the hangar fridge (I have two refrigerators in the hangar) and relaxed as the sun finished its descent over the other side of the runway.
Saturday brought some more interesting winds and we needed to get out and play with the new control tower at our field before it becomes really “official” next week. We were off the ground by about 10:30am. More Tanya training. With the higher winds (gusting to 20+ knots) this was a great time to practice turns around a point and S-turns across a road :). We spent the better part of an hour with her practicing those two things. Super high value time. All a great exercise to maneuver in relation to the ground and maintain altitude. As a reward I suggested that she fly over the neighborhood and utilize these skills. Back at the airport she set us up for a great pattern entry and it was my turn. I did six laps in the pattern with touch-n-goes to exercise me and the new tower trainees. The gusting winds were very good practice for me. Much fun. Time to go home and cook some BBQ.