Hey thanks for coming back for more of my scribblings. This morning brought another flying lesson with it.
This lesson included spiral dives and an air exercise called 'Slipping'. Spiral Dives can happen in a few different ways, but most of these ways occur because the pilot wasn't paying attention or because the pilot became momentarily disoriented, which can occur when a pilot who's untrained in flying into clouds, flies into a cloud.
Spiral dives aren't as scary looking as spins, but can be more dangerous due to the nose down attitude of the airplane, and rapidly increasing air-speeds. If one isn't careful in gently pulling out of a spiral, or doesn't recognize when a spiral is happening, the airframe of the airplane can become stressed to the point of critical damage due to the high airspeeds and add G forces. You can read more about spiral dives here if you wish. Spiral dives were a fun exercise for me to practice, even though it was probably the most dangerous exercise to attempt.
When it comes to 'slipping', there are a few different types. Slipping is a maneuver in which the pilot uses cross controls (left rudder pedal and right aileron input, or vice versa) in order to accomplish either a fast loss of altitude without threat of damage to the airframe, a turn while needing to lose altitude quickly, or as a technique for landing with a crosswind ( a wind that is not directly aligned with the runway, but is instead approaching the airplane from either side). You can read more about side slips and forward slips here.
It's a good thing we practiced the latter, because during today's approach and landing I did encounter some cross-wind, and I did have to perform a side-slip landing. A side-slip landing looks something like this, except the guy in this video did a heck of a job landing the airplane. My landing was a bit rougher but I was still pretty happy with it, taking into account it was my first slide-slip try, and I was quite surprised by the amount of input you have to apply on the controls. Take a look at the movement of the flight stick in this video:
It really is a fun way to land, but you do have to be on top of your game, as the wind direction and strength change, so do your flight control inputs. As well, during a slide-slip landing, the landing is preformed with only one of the wheels touching down first due to the configuration of the side-slip.
My apologies if this is getting too technical for some. I only speak this way because I don't have much else to talk about. Though there was a couple of other things that are worth mentioning.
I was assigned an airplane this morning with the callsign FFHH (that's Foxtrot Foxtrot Hotel Hotel), quite the tongue twister for a beginner pilot such as myself. I did the walk around checklist, made sure everything is fine, we got in the airplane, turned the engine on, and a weird sound was audible. I mentioned it to my instructor, and he instructed me to turn off the engine as he took a look outside. He came back and said that we're not going to fly that airplane today. He proceeded to show me what was wrong - two pieces of metal that looked like they were harnessing the prop, or maybe just covering it, were lose. I saw two screws missing. and the parts were lose. It was probably nothing, but it was creating the sound we heard, and since we were going to practice some extreme flying, it was probably best to have the engineers take a look at the airplane.
So we got another airplane with the call-sign Echo Yankee Whiskey. I was glad we got another airplane, only because I wouldn't have to repeat Foxtrot Foxtrot Hotel Hotel on the radios again. Whew.
What's up next? Well, I have a check-ride next lesson. That's when another instructor takes me up, and monitors my progress on everything I've learned up to now. It's not a test, more of a progress report. I'm looking forward to hearing someone else's point of view on how I'm progressing.
It's also crunch time for me to take my radio license test and my PSTAR test, as my solo flight is coming up. Yes, my solo flight. I'm 12.5 hours in, and my instructor is talking to me about flying solo. Should be fun times coming up, I'll keep you posted.
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