Weekly Checkup

This weekly flight schedule is getting pretty old. I wish I could be back up to twice a week, but I think I'm not likely to see that for a while. The weather is just too spotty (as if it was winter or something). Nevertheless, the clouds parted just long enough to get a good flight in today. I was prepared to solo and practice my maneuvers for an hour or so, but was able to snag an instructor to go up with me to get more prepared for the checkride.

Today was calm on the surface, with a moderate wind aloft and about 7 to 8000 feet to the ceiling. It was a balmy 25 degrees, with only a few degrees to the dew point, but the air was fairly dry and the only symptoms of poor weather were some scattered snow showers to the north.

It was really just a grab-bag of maneuvers today, and I had never flown with this particular instructor before. We did a soft-field takeoff and turned away from the field, then I donned the hood for some brief climbs and turns to headings. That went smoothly enough, and compared to my typical half-hour practice sessions, the 15 or so minutes went by pretty quickly.

Then we did our clearing turns and set up for some steep turns. I almost told the instructor that this was one of my weak points, but figured I'd better just get on with it and not give voice to what really isn't all that bad. Indeed, I heeded my instructor's advice from last time to enter the turn very smoothly. You don't need to snap the wings over to 45 degrees, just get there about the time you've turned nearly 90 degrees from the original heading. So, with that, the first turn to the left came out very well. The turn to the right ballooned a bit, but I kept it under control and didn't bust the 100-foot deviation limit.

Then we slowed down for some minimum-controllable airspeed exercises. About the biggest problem I have with these is getting the speed down in a reasonable amount of time. Rather than setting power where you want it, you really need to reduce it even more and then add a bit as the speed decays. The DA-20 is just too slippery to do it in a timely manner any other way. Unfortunately, I still don't have all the pitch/power/airspeed combinations memorized, so I just target the speed that I want and fiddle with the power until the vertical speed is stabilized. This works pretty well, since there's only a range of a few hundred RPM between different configurations, so I can get close on the first try.

We kept up with the slow flight and added power-off stalls. I did these well, but the instructor pointed out a little flaw (and one that I have never been taught). My typical profile is to reduce power, drop flaps, drop more flaps, and then add a bit of power to maintain altitude. I've been instructed to keep the altitude pegged from the start of the maneuver until the stall. Supposedly, this is not what the examiner wants. (I don't know if this is universal, or some kind of personal preference on the part of the individual examiners.) What he wants is for the plane to be in a descent more like a typical landing profile, then pull back and induce the stall. It's a fairly trivial difference, but it's good to know that might be expected. At least I will know enough to ask during the checkride.

After the slow stuff, we went back to fast, for some power-on stalls. I was a bit over-enthusiastic about these apparently, and forgot to configure for takeoff (as the exercise is supposed to mimic a stall during departure). I went ahead and pushed the throttle in, and we rocketed up 1000 feet, as I realized what I had done. I almost got it to stall, but it was better to level it out and try again. Done properly, it worked out just right.

The added altitude generated by my little space-flight imitation was a nice setup for my next trick - a simulated engine failure, complete with an actual touchdown at the nearby uncontrolled field. This was to be my second engine-out landing, and this one was different in that I was just over 4000 feet above the ground, and about 4 miles from the field (which I could not see from the left seat at the time of the "failure"). So I went through the necessary steps of catching the best glide speed and going through the engine-failure flow check, and had plenty of time to look around. I realized then where we were, confirmed by the GPS, and made a turn toward the field. But now, I had a different problem, needing to rocket back down to earth. I have never done a spiral, and didn't know if it was appropriate, but the instructor just let me do what I felt would work, and he just sat back.

Since I had so much altitude to lose and I had a lot of other options if there really were an emergency, I decided to drop the nose and try to set up for a fairly normal descent. The actual distance from the failure to touchdown was about 9.5 miles. So, even at 1.5 times the optimum glide speed, the gradient was still nearly the optimum 11:1 given in the book. It was quite a challenge to time everything out right, and I came in a bit too fast, with only half flaps. Had it been an actual emergency, I would have dropped the flaps all the way as I was on short final (but technically a bit too fast for them). The instructor thought it would have been a good landing anyway, and I still had quite a bit of runway left, so I guess it all worked out. I even kept up the non-tower radio calls, which I probably would have left out in the real thing.

Finally, it was back to the home base to practice some more soft- and short-field landings. We had to do a 360 for spacing, but all went well, and my landings were good today. I had a bit of a bounce and float on one of them, but at least held the nose up and didn't porpoise. Hey, if even the big guys do it every once in a while, I can't be too hard on myself.

Our go-arounds don't take too long, and I did four of them. While we were doing that, there were quite a few other planes around, and there was a Horizon Air flight holding at the runway the whole time. We offered to extend our pattern so that he could get out, but the other planes coming in made it irrelevant. I knew that it wasn't our fault, but I couldn't help imagining the passengers seeing the same plane land four times while they just sat there burning fuel. Score one for the airlines blaming delays on the little guys.