Out of the Groove

I suppose that I had to hit a plateau sooner or later. It just happened to settle in now, just before my checkride. Another flight with the instructor today - one that should have been just about perfect - and I just couldn't seem to make it all come together.

The first exercise was steep turns - not surprising since this has been my greatest struggle. My practice is apparently paying off. They were much better today than almost any in the past. My instructor says they are one of the hardest maneuvers in the DA-20 due to the pitch sensitivity, and I have to agree. But I managed to stick to my altitude and effectively manage the nose so that I didn't wallow through them. Like almost everyone else, I have a preference for one direction over the other, and my left turns are smoother than my rights.

Then we did some slow flight (in similar fashion as my solo practice last week). This also went off without a hitch, as I had some nice, clean breaks as the wings stalled and I brought the nose level (not down!). The biggest problem (if you can really call it that) is just getting the power and pitch set just right rather than fiddling with them for a minute. It's not that I can't perform the required tasks, but it would show much better form and be smoother if I could target the airspeed with fewer fluctuations.

We followed with another couple of steep turns, even better than the first sets. I began to think (and still do) that part of my problem is just the number of hours per week that I am able to fly. Way back when, I was flying two - and occasionally three - times a week. Now, I'm down to once, sometimes twice. I think if I could fly a bit more consistently, I'd have the entire thing handled.

Next came some more hood work. This is where things kind of came apart, and never really recovered. I had much more difficulty than I remember ever having maintaining basic control while performing radio and navigation tasks. My altitude wandered (badly), my heading wasn't much better, and I was just really getting behind the plane. We did a constant rate descent, which was much descending, but little that could be considered "constant". I think it was about this time that my instructor decided that I would need another flight before the checkride. Little did he know that I had more to reinforce that feeling.

We went back in to the field for some touch-and-go's, and the first approach was dead-on. I did my best at keeping a stabilized descent, and then had a smooth touchdown. We went back up, and then I tried a no-flap landing. I don't remember the last one of these that I tried, but I couldn't even get the plane slowed to touchdown. I felt like it was going to bounce, so I just added power to try again.

So we changed it around a bit, and added a "power failure" in the pattern, again with no flaps. This time, knowing that it took so long to get down before, I went a bit too far on downwind. If this had been a real emergency, they'd probably still be picking the plane out of the weeds. In any case, we did make it back down safely, and I tried it again. This time, I turned in towards the runway, but we again had too much speed, and I couldn't get the wheels down without a bounce. So I went around again.

This time, we had to extend the downwind for other traffic. I decided that with half flaps, I would slow the plane so that we weren't so far out when it came time to turn base. But I didn't realize just how far out we were, and we had the longest final approach in history at 80 knots, two miles out. The nice thing was that the approach was right on, and the landing was decent, with the only negative being slightly off centerline. One more approach for a short field landing, also which turned out just right, but again off to the left.

The final analysis: I'm a safe, competent pilot, but my flying needs quite a bit more spit and polish to satisfy an examiner. One more session with the instructor is in order, again.