Flight School Day 4

Today we practiced some more stalls and added the power-on stall where we slowed down to about 60mph and then increased the throttle to full-throttle while pulling up.  This was a bit easier to recover from without losing much altitude but you feel like you are going pretty steep before the plane actually stalls.

Then we flew to a grass strip called Moontown.  Caroline flew there in 7th grade.  I attempted 4 landings of which two actually ended up with the plane on the ground and the others ended in go-arounds.  Aaron also taught me how to side-slip to lose altitude because I kept coming in too high.  I seem to have a psychological block preventing me from wanting to fly close to the ground :-)  That’s probably been the most wild maneuver so far but it seems to work nicely for him.  I am getting a lot more comfortable with the takeoffs–I didn’t realize how far you have to push the stick forward to get the tail off the ground before but now it seems to work nice.  I am still fighting against drifting left on takeoff but it’s getting better.  Also, my turns in the pattern are still a bit shallow and I end up flying a bit past the runway and having to come back in.

We flew back to Madison County and I judged the distance better and chose the correct time to idle the engine and we made it at about the right altitude but I wasn’t completely level when we touched down and we bounced on one wheel before settling onto the runway.  He seemed pleased with the landing though–he was probably just glad we survived.

The attached image is from the Moontown webpage, I just thought you’d like to see what it looks like.

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