06/19/08 18:00

Stats: 1.5 Dual Hours, 5 Day Landings, Steep turns, ground reference maneuvers, stalls, emergency procedures. Total Hours to date: 7.7

I’m convinced today is going to be my best day up there yet. The winds are very light, it’s warm but not unbearable. Everything is going great and then we do some steep turns. Ron says to roll into a left turn and take it to 45 degrees. As I’m trying to figure out how much rudder to use, I happen to look out the side window and straight down at the ground. If you’ve never done it, I certainly recommend it, but just be sure you’re prepared as it can be a little weird. I, of course, mention it to Ron and he comes back with, “You have to do 60 degrees for your commercial license”. I couldn’t come up with a good response. We were only at about 3000′ AGL, but I’m going to blame lack of oxygen, yeah, that’s it.

I completely bomb on turns around a point, so we do some S-turns to make me feel better. Then as we head back to Mount Comfort, Ron introduces me to the forward slip. This is another one of those tricky coordination maneuvers, but this one has real life use. Basically, you roll the plane one direction and use the rudder in the opposite direction to keep it going in the same direction. It is very handy for losing altitude as it adds a lot of drag since the plane is essentially flying sideways. I kind of like this one, which is good since I’m going to be using it a lot.

As we prepare for landing, Ron has me keep my approach a little high (which I seem to be good at anyway) so I can try the slip on final. It goes o.k., but I will definitely need to keep practicing this one to get it down.