I was a little late to my Saturday morning lesson, partly due to road repair detours, but mainly due to my less-than-amazing navigational skills. Interstate 44 that runs through Tulsa has been under repair for what seems like years now, and that's the easiest way for me to get to Riverside airport. After braving construction traffic, I took the Highway 75 exit ramp, only to be deposited immediately back onto I-44 headed the way I had come. Apparently they're starting work on HW75 now as well. I took the first exit, and headed in the general direction of the airport, only to find that someone had dumped a large industrial complex right where I needed to drive, how thoughtless!
At any rate, I found my way back to roads I recognized, and made it to Riverside Airport about ten minutes after my lesson was due to start. Bob was in the flight school building chatting with another instructor and a student pilot, so I grabbed the documentation for our Cessna 152 and went out to do the pre-flight inspection.
As the Oklahoma Highway Patrol was buzzing the highways in their Cessna 172, looking for speeders, we chose to head to the south practice area. After getting everything in the airplane situated, we tuned the radio for the latest weather, called Riverside Ground for taxi clearance, and headed to the run-up area. During the magneto checks, the engine spluttered a little, so I raised the RPMs to 2000, and leaned the fuel mixture to burn the spark plugs clean. With run-up complete, we were given clearance to take off to the south, and climb to 4,500 feet.
We climbed through the bumpy air to about 3,000 feet where it started to smooth out, at 4,500 we leveled off and flew southeast at Tulsa Air Traffic Control's request, before turning back south. The day's lesson plan was to practice all the stall procedures and do some steep turns. Everything was going well until the second steep turn, I didn't pull back on the controls enough to maintain our altitude, so we lost about three hundred feet as we went all the way around. I got us back up to 4,500, and tried again. It went much better the second time.
As it was time to head back to the airport, Bob had me do an emergency descent, full flaps and nose down to maintain 85 knots. We leveled off at 2,500 feet and told ATC that we were inbound for close pattern work. Back down under 3,000 feet it was still really bumpy, as we approached the airport, we were given clearance for a full stop landing on runway 19 left.
The final approach was quite a ride, we had a slight crosswind that I had to compensate for, as well as the moderate turbulence still knocking us about. I somehow managed to get the plane down just left of the runway center line. As the nose gear touched down, the whole plane started shuddering, Bob pulled back on the controls to ease the weight back up off of the nose, and the shuddering stopped. As we slowed down, the nose gear took the weight of the plane smoothly, and we taxied back to the parking area. Bob explained that the shuddering was nose gear vibration, probably caused by some side load to the wheel when we touched down.
My next few Wednesday lessons will be from 8:00 to 10:00 PM, so I will get to experience some night flying!
Talk to you soon!
-Gareth
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