Wednesday's lesson last week was canceled again due to the weather, but Saturday was beautiful. The wind was almost dead calm when I arrived at the airport just before my 9 AM lesson, but it was pretty chilly, I need to start taking some gloves to wear for the pre-flight inspection. We had plenty of fuel and oil, and everything else checked out, so we got the lesson plan and decided to head northwest for some more maneuvering practice.
We climbed out of Riverside and headed for the practice area. Once we got up to 2500 feet we started with some steep turns, at 45 degrees all the way around to the right, then back around to the left. Then did some stall practice, we did an approach to land stall, with full flaps down, then a departure stall, where you slow down to 50 knots then push in full power and pull back to simulate a too-steep take off.
With stalls successfully completed, we did some slow flight and slow turns, as the wind was so calm I performed by best slow turns to date, nice and smooth and maintained altitude and speed just about perfectly.
After that we started looking for some ground points for ground reference maneuvers, we found a road and did some S-Turns over it, then found an oil pump out in a field to do turns-around-a-point around. The wind was starting to pick up a little, but not really enough to blow us off course very quickly, so the ground reference maneuvers (which are supposed to counteract wind drift) were a little useless, but still good practice for the theory part.
We headed back to Riverside and did a soft field landing, then got the plane tied down and headed inside to talk about the lesson.
Soon we will be planning a cross-country trip, probably to Fayetteville in Arkansas, then up to Joplin in Missouri before coming back to Riverside. Bob tells me that it should take about 4 hours actual flight time for the whole excursion, and as we will be taking the Cessna 172, my wife Melodie can come along for the ride!
More to come!
-Gareth
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