There's a pretty good sized airplane rental place on Riverside Airport, run by Christiansen Aviation, and they have two or three Cessna 152's available, so I met Bob there on Wednesday evening, and we checked out 340SX.
The plane was in pretty nice shape, and it had a Garmin GPS in the radio stack, which I hadn't had a chance to play with before, but it's not a Sparrowhawk 152 like our usual ride apparently is. Sparrowhawk is an engine upgrade that boosts horsepower from 110 to 125 by using the higher compression pistons from a different engine.As I had missed a few lessons, I was nervous about all the things I might have forgotten, but once we got to the airplane, I started feeling more comfortable. Christiansen doesn't keep fuelhawks or fuel testers in their airplanes, so I went back into the FBO and bought them for myself. The fuel tanks were a little low, so Bob called for the fuel truck and they put in another three or four gallons per side as I finished up the pre-flight checks. We tuned the radio to ATIS to get the weather report, got taxi clearance from ground control, and headed to the run-up area.
I guess every airplane has its own little quirks, the first one I noticed for 340SX is that if you want to turn left while taxiing, the rudder pedals will work fine, but for turning right, you have to use differential braking to help it along. The control surfaces all move freely and as far as they're supposed to though, so it was nothing to actually worry about. With run-up complete, we got clearance to the runway, using a taxiway intersection instead of rolling all the way down to the end.
We rolled out on to the runway, and I gave it full throttle, eased back on the controls at 50 knots and we were airborne. I set the trim to help me maintain a 67 knot climb, but with the temperature, weight of the aircraft, and being short 15 horsepower, we were only climbing between 200 and 300 feet per minute, with the Garmin showing a groundspeed of 60 knots.
It took us 12 miles to climb up to 4500 feet, but once we got there, the air was a lovely 80 degrees fahrenheit, much more comfortable.
I performed the clearing turns to the west and back to south, then we did some slow flight, followed up by stalls. This 152 stalls really gently, barely a buffet and the warning horn to let you know whats going on. For the Landing configuration stall, with the flaps down, it tried to roll out to the right even when I could swear that the turn coordinator was perfectly centered. Oh well, it's good practice anyway.
We turned to head back to the airport, with a quick detour for an engine failure simulation.
As we were cruising back toward Riverside I noticed a quiet beeping coming through my headset, I mentioned it to Bob, but he said he didn't hear it. I increased the throttle and the pitch of the beeping went up with it, I said something along the lines of "Hey, that weird beeping goes to a higher pitch with the throttle" and looked over to see Bob waving his hands at me. Oh No! I had been holding the radio button down! Riverside tower called us up to re-confirm our landing clearance, I was so embarrased! Bob told me that everyone does that at some point, so hopefully that's mine out of the way. Note to Self - Intercom does not require the button!
As we had been given clearance to land on runway 19 right, we flew past the west side of the airport as our downwind leg, then dropped in the first notch of flaps, and started our descent, turning on to Base and Final, then landing nice and gently and almost on the runway centerline.
We got 340SX shut down and parked, then went back over to the Roadhouse Aviation hanger to see what was going on with our usual 152. Michael Schield was there talking to another student pilot. Michael told us that the owner of the Flight School had given authorization to order two brand new tensioners, at $1800 each!
The 152 will be ready for the Saturday Morning lesson, hooray!
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