I passed my written test with a 93% on Saturday and so now we are preparing exclusively for the test.
I told Aaron we still haven’t practiced any turning stalls, so that was the first thing we tried. I was really concerned about getting in a spin from a banked stall but conveniently enough the high wing is the one that falls and it seems to automatically help level the wings. So there was really no big problem with banked stalls.
Then he showed me accelerated stalls. The idea is that airplanes stall at a particular angle of attack not a particular speed. In straight and level flight the speed is fixed, but if you are experiencing more G’s the airplane will be at a higher angle of attack for your speed and stall at a higher speed. So he had me turn really sharp–close to 90 degrees of bank–while attempting to keep the nose above the horizon. This led to a higher than usual stall speed but the recovery was still about the same.
Next he decided to teach me how to perform and recover from spins. This won’t be on the test, but it’s a good thing to know how to do. Basically we turned off the throttle and pulled back until the airplane started to stall when we completely pushed in one rudder peddle, this causes the plane to roll all the way over on that side and enter a spin. When we decide to recover we relax the stick and apply opposite rudder to stop the spin and pull up to the horizon. We did this about 3 times–that many times in such a short period of time is quite dizzying. We did it with the gyro turned off and when we were done it was rolling uncontrollably about 3-4 times per second which I’m pretty sure is faster than any roll we performed.
Here’s a video of someone else performing the same maneuver in a similar plane:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61f_634dx_0&feature=related
We finished with short field landing practices. The landings were all very smooth, but I was consistently quite low on the final approach, so we will probably spend some more time practicing this for the test.
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