One of my friends, Jari, was driving down from Michigan on Friday, and staying the night with a cousin in St. Louis. I got a one-way ticket to St. Louis for Saturday morning, arriving at around 9:30.
This was my first commercial flight since starting my lessons, and knowing a bit about what was going on in the front seats made it a lot more enjoyable. I was able to sort out our location on my airport diagram printouts, as I had learned about the taxiway signs, and I was really paying attention during the base, final and landing in St Louis. It felt very fast. In the Cessna 152, we are aiming for 60 knots airspeed at landing, from what I can find the 737-300 has a landing speed of between 107 and 152 knots airspeed depending on the weight.
Jari arrived at the airport a few minutes after I got off the plane, and we drove back to Tulsa, a long, but uneventful drive. We got home in plenty of time to go to Mom's house for my youngest sister Rachel's birthday dinner.
On the evening of Wednesday the 14th, I arrived at Riverside airport for my fifth lesson. The rain had finally stopped, but the winds were gusting from ten to nineteen knots, and variable from the south and east, with a few broken layers of clouds at 3700' and higher. The 152 was a quart low on oil, and a few gallons low on gas, so Bob called the FBO for a top-up while we went over the lesson plan. Once we got out to the airplane it became obvious that missing Saturday's lesson had set me back a bit, I fumbled my way through the engine start and run-up checklists, then announced on the radio that we were run-up complete. Bob then had to call back and apologize, and tell the nice people on the Ground frequency that we were at Roadhouse West, had the latest weather information, requesting a west departure with radar following and that we were run-up complete.
We were given the option of using runway 13, due to the wind, and Bob figured it would be a good opportunity, as 13 isn't used very often. Runway 13 crosses both runways 19 Left and Right, is short and bumpy, and is aimed pretty much straight at a noise abatement area, so as soon as we were five hundred above the ground we had to turn to the south for a while then west to the practice area.
We climbed to 3500 feet and practiced some stalls. On the landing configuration stall, the wing went over again just as it had on my last lesson. Bob took the controls and showed me how to gently work the rudder pedals in small and smooth adjustments, instead of just cramming it over to try to counteract the stall that had already happened. The next few were much smoother, so we moved on to slow flight.
I actually enjoy slow flight, there's a constant demand for small precise control input, that I do my very best to keep up with, It really shows how sensitive all the controls are at low speed, especially the rudder. We made some ninety degree turns to the south and back, then brought the airplane back to normal flight and headed home to the airport.
The wind had shifted around again, so we were cleared to land on 19 right. We decided to do a crab landing to counteract the crosswind, which resulted in a great (in that we could use the plane again) but not very smooth landing.
I was told to study the emergency procedures checklists for engine failures during the takeoff roll, after takeoff, and mid-flight, as we would be simulating those on my next lesson.
See ya next time!
-Gareth
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