A Good Review

Flight review done!

After the past few days of practice, both the instructor and I thought today would be good for the official review.  All the maneuvers are better, along with the landings, and while nothing is perfect everything is within tolerances of safety.  Plus, the book learning part went as smoothly as it could have.  The instructor did his job and asked just enough questions that I wasn't 100% sure of, but overall knew what I didn't know.  The past few days have seen a combination of reading, highlighting the FAR/AIM book, and studying a few online review pages.  

Ultimately, I didn't even have to crack the book, but as always there are a few things that everyone will miss.  Luckily, the instructor was good at letting me work out which points I wasn't sure of and not letting me get away with not knowing the most important parts.  Key items covered were basic VFR regulations, responsibilities of the Pilot in Command, aircraft requirements, airspace, VFR equipment, weather, icing, altitudes, and airspeeds.

Then we got to the airwork.  A short-field takeoff went better than before, and I also am more used to managing the navigation systems so we were able to immediately get on track with the VOR to the practice area.  As we stabilized on a heading at altitude the "clouds" dropped and I had to do a bit of simulated instrument flying.  A few turns and more VOR tracking, then into some unusual attitude recovery.  With my head down and eyes closed, I felt like I was on a roller coaster while the instructor tried to get me disoriented.  I think he was having a bit of fun as well.  

Back to visual flying, we did more steep turns.  The first to the right was okay for about 3/4 of the way around, and the left started out a bit off until the instructor covered the instruments and made me do the whole thing with eyes outside.  Turns out that works much better once I have the sight picture set.  Then it was some slow flight and stalls.  The DA20 was tolerant of a bit of aileron input as long as about 90% of any correction came from the rudder.  But the 172 is less so.  While the stalls broke just fine and we stayed on heading, the instructor thought I was putting in too much aileron.  So he quickly demonstrated what happens if you actually do overcontrol the roll and let one of the wings drop suddenly in the stall.  

To wrap up we did some simulated engine failure, restart, securing, and emergency landing drills.  Then back to the field for a few landings, one of which had some much better executed slips to landing.  Going forward, one of my personal minimums will be a 5 knot crosswind until I get smoother at the correction all the way to touchdown. 

The last landing was a power-off 180 to land, which I was able to do quite well and was pretty proud of the outcome.  Didn't even have to touch the throttle.

So now even though I'm legal to get back in the air on my own, I've still scheduled one more lesson with this instructor just to get a bit more polish on the maneuvers.