Bad Attitudes

Today was to be another "wild card" with much of the lesson dependent on what the weather did. As it turned out, the forecast was pretty much on, but the predicted snow appeared to be moving in just a bit faster than expected. And since my recent flying schedule has been on the ragged edge of the weather (finding a narrow window of good weather here and there), a little bit makes a big difference. So what was to be a couple of hours in the sky had to be cut short. But that really wasn't a big deal; it just means I need one more flight to finish off the hood work.

Overall, I'm rapidly approaching the checkride, and due to my expressed interest in an instrument rating, we did a bit of hood work that went beyond the standard PTS topics. We did some more slow flight and stalls, VOR tracking, and miscellaneous multi-tasking, but we also did some timed turns (using rule-of-thumb true airspeed calculations) and did some more aggressive unusual attitude recoveries.

It was this latter exercise that nearly turned my stomach. We have typically done maneuvers that were also found in other exercises: power-on stalls, turning stalls, and the random ups, downs, and power settings that can be found in inadvertent flight into clouds. This time (without my prior knowledge), the instructor took us to the edge of aerobatic flight, with near-60 degree banks and near 25-degree pitch up and down. Still well within the limits of the plane, I could definitely tell we were pulling more G's, but as the books all say, you can't trust your inner ear. He would jink one way, then enter a full bank the other way, adjust the power in the middle. By the time I would look up, we weren't how I felt we would be, and the attitude indicator was in a place I haven't seen before.
Even with all that, it was a fun flight, and I was able to handle the recoveries with only one glaring error: I would forget to put my feet back on the rudder pedals on a couple (I'm sure it had something to do with my concentration on not getting sick....) Although I was too busy to notice, T.I. said that we had some light negative-G moments at the top of one of these, too.

At the end, we did a couple more VFR steep turns, which I did much better than last time. I asked whether the checkride would include steep turns under the hood. The answer was that technically, it could, but no one had heard of any instances where this had occurred. So as long as I can keep things upright with the visual horizon, I should be all right.

My last required hours are another half-hour of hood time and another 2.5 hours or so of solo cross country. I will see if I can get the written test done next week as well... Not too much longer...