Category: Real World Instruction
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The weather in my neck of the woods has been consistently bad, or at least bad enough, that night take offs and landings (which is my next real-world lesson) have been off the books from a safety perspective whenever we’ve tried to go up. It’s been about three weeks since my last flight, and I…
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That was the point of yesterday’s real world lesson. In ground reference maneuvers you learn to fly a consistent shape over the ground – circles, s-turns across a road, rectangles – as practice for keeping the airplane on a consistent ground track when flying the traffic pattern. We actually tackled this earlier in my training,…
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I was back in the real airplane today for the first time since November 14, thanks to a pattern of high winds that led to three cancelled flight lessons. But today was great for learning, with slight turbulence and crosswinds of about seven knots. The curriculum for today was to take off, climb to 2,500…
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Conditions for today’s lesson looked relatively benign, but don’t be fooled by the appearances. While our winds on the field were 300 @ 6 knots, we quickly learned on takeoff that at about 200 feet they were cranking much, much stronger. I’m not sure how strong, but at 3,000 they were about 39 knots. This…
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And I don’t just mean the powerful effect it has on women. Today my real-world flight lessons cancelled for low ceilings. I used to stress about that, but now I know it’s just part of the process. But my routine for flight training is solid enough now that I just went down to the basement,…
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Today was flight lesson #18, and we used it to do more pattern work, spiced up with no-flaps landings (2), no-power landings (2), a short-field take off, and a soft-field take off. All of this was interesting and fun to fly, and I flew well. Well enough that when taxing back to the ramp at…
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A really great lesson today in my real-world flight training. We had wonderful weather, cool and clear and sunny with winds around six knots, and we used it to do more pattern work. This included normal landings, two no-flap landings, and two power-off landings (which are the truncated approaches in the below image), as well…
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Today in my real-world flight instruction we did pattern work. This was the second lesson in the past three days, and I have been very grateful to get some time in the airplane after logging a whopping two hours in August. I think I had six or seven lessons either scrub or need to be…
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After my flight lesson yesterday my CFI did something cool. During the debrief he asked me to look at a website with him, CloudAhoy. This site apparently links to an app on his iPhone that, when activated, tracks our flight and uploads it to the CloudAhoy servers. I know ForeFlight does this, but what’s cool…
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There’s a nice blog post here from a pilot who recently toured SoCal TRACON (the Terminal Radar Approach CONtrol for the Sothern California region, the nation’s busiest and also the airspace you fly on PilotEdge). It’s very interesting, especially for VFR pilots (which was his focus in writing the piece). One insight for me was…
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